Tucked into a heritage building in West Vancouver, near the foot of Cypress Mountain, is a little institution that functions—in an unlikely but inspired way—as that municipality’s leading public art gallery. Despite acute limitations of size and amenities, the West Vancouver Museum is the site of an ambitious exhibition program that primarily addresses the region’s visual culture. Under the inspired guidance of curator Darrin Morrison and assistant curator Kiriko Watanabe, the focus seems to be on the art, design and architectural histories of the community as they reflect the wider world. Part of what this program has revealed is the astonishing number of creative and accomplished people who, at one time or another, have located their homes or studios in West Vancouver. They include B.C. Binning, Gordon Smith, Takao Tanabe, Sylvia Tait, Alistair Bell and Joan Balzar, along with younger artists such as Lyle Wilson—all celebrated through shows mounted in this little stone structure over the past few years.
The subject of the current WVM show, and of a smartly written and beautifully designed companion book, co-published with Douglas & McIntyre, is architectural photographer Selwyn Pullan. Now 90, Pullan was a leading Canadian proponent of the emerging discipline of architectural photography and is closely associated with the mid-20th-century florescence of one of this country’s most significant architectural movements, West Coast modernism. Digital prints of his black-and-white and colour photos, most of them originally commissioned by architectural firms or shelter and lifestyle magazines, lucidly articulate what is most compelling and distinctive about cutting-edge residential, commercial and institutional structures built in the Vancouver area between the late 1940s and the mid-1970s. At the same time, his black-and-white prints, in particular, reveal some unexpected formal and technical influences more closely associated with romantic landscape traditions and nature photography than with depictions of the straightedged products of human engineering.
As recounted in Watanabe’s biographical essay, the Vancouver-born Pullan passionately embraced photography in his teens. In preparing himself for his acclaimed commercial career, he studied at the Vancouver Technical School and, following the Second World War, at the Art Center School in Los Angeles. There he encountered Ansel Adams, who was “pivotal to his development as a photographer.” Watanabe explains that the Zone System, which Adams had evolved along with Fred Archer, enabled Pullan to “recognize how the differing luminance of [the] subject’s various zones would affect the exposure and, consequentially, the grey values of the final print.”
However Pullan deployed his light meter and attuned his darkroom techniques, his black-and-white photos evince an impressive clarity of form, depth of vision, breadth of detail and satiny range of grey tones. (He worked with a handmade 4-by-5 view camera, fitted, he told Watanabe, with the “adjustments” he needed to take architectural photographs.) Pullan’s black-and-white photos of the exteriors of modernist residences, far more than his colour work or even his black-and-white shots of commercial structures such as the Westcoast Transmission building, also evince a romanticizing relationship with his subjects as they occupy their distinctively West Coast sites. In his work, houses find creative purchase within the landscape on wooded mountainsides or rocky shorelines, with vistas of secluded coves, islands and forests draped in mist or bathed in blessed sunlight.
A stellar example in the exhibition is Pullan’s 1955 image of the Porter Residence in West Vancouver. Standing amid towering conifers, beside a tumbling mountain stream, this home exudes the best of West Coast modernism: it is harmoniously sited within its natural environment; its lines are clean and uncluttered; the nether side of its overhanging roof exposes its use of local natural materials; and its exterior walls, constructed out of partitioned expanses of glass, promise to admit abundant light and create a sense of communion between outdoors and in. (In the book, Pullan’s interior shot of the Porter house registers an almost magical continuity between the carpeted living room and the lawn beyond its floor-to-ceiling windows, and also between the verticals of interior beams and window frames and those of the tree trunks in the surrounding forest.)
It is not simply the architecture that is notable here, but the way Pullan has framed the house within the landscape, imbuing the whole with the same heroic aspiration as an Ansel Adams take on the Western wilderness. The foreground stream is a silky blur of movement, contrasting with the highly articulated fern fronds and ground cover that form the stage upon which the house, with its dramatically thrusting roofline, rises like a gleaming mountain. Silvery light suffuses the scene with an atmosphere of the romantic sublime. No human beings—nor other signs of habitation—clutter the landscape.
Similarly—although more awkwardly—one of Pullan’s black-and-white 1970 shots of the exterior of the Simons Residence, taken from a vine-clad drop-off below its wood-fronted facade, presents the house as a dark, exaggerated, sharply angled peak rising out of the dense foliage. More appealing is Pullan’s 1965 black-and-white image of the D. Graham waterfront residence, its multiple levels built into its hillside site, its bold horizontals and abundant use of glass and wood set off by scattered rocks and coniferous trees and overlooking the quintessential West Vancouver seascape. The prevailing romantic and heroic mood of these images perfectly suited Pullan’s architectural clients, of course. West Coast modernist architecture aspired to be bold, to be free, and to be integrated into the natural environment.
Pullan’s colour photographs don’t work in the same way. Shot mostly for magazines such as Western Homes and Living, they evince a similar precision and an eye for the contextualizing detail, but their palette, although digitally adjusted to match Pullan’s original prints, doesn’t convey the same drama as the black-and-white work. And the set-ups, featuring the houses’ occupants (who are usually young families—these were the baby-boom years, after all), are a bit too carefully staged and a bit too perky for my taste. Still, there is commercial logic in the way families are included to make these straight-lined, open-plan homes appear comfortable and livable rather than stark and cold.
Both the exterior and interior shots were designed to sell a product through a carefully assembled set of social and visual constructs. Still, the artifice that appeals most to me is that of the black-and-white Zone System, the Ansel Adams-esque wilderness romance in which nature makes only the slightest concession to culture, and in which overpopulation, overdevelopment, and skyrocketing real estate prices are not even the wispiest of clouds on the far horizon.
It’s no coincidence, I think, that the images in the Selwyn Pullan exhibition and book date no later than 1976—at the end of the modernist movement in architecture, yes, but also concurrent with the rise of the New Topographics photographers, who gave us forthright images of tract housing spreading like a disease across the blasted landscape. It’s just a few decades, too, before many of these stellar examples of West Coast modernism were demolished to make way for blandly hideous monster houses. As with so many exhibitions of art on view in Vancouver these days, this WVM celebration of our fascinating past is underscored by loss.
