Hard of Housing

Wendy Kwan and Russel Kwan

Wendy Kwan

Caught between the planning chaos for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games and a worldwide economic meltdown sit the remnants of the Little Mountain Public Housing project.

Lives fractured, relocated, a few remain amid the desolation.

Spaces fracture, plaster cracks and mold infests. Empty, the walls crumble against the relentless elements.

Graffiti taggers dare not, something else inspires. Those who once lived here, artists, activists, for now this is their canvas, their sanctuary. Happy smiling characters wave and dance as though still there, now placed in windows plywood covered - daily reminders to all who pass.

We must question. There are no easy answers.

Little Mountain stands, a small symbol, of deeper fractures. We must renew, but are otherwise busy.

Photographer’s note:

The Little Mountain Public Housing Project is located only blocks from my home in Vancouver Canada. I have made many trips to the site over several months, photographing the unfolding story, often stopping to chat with those curious, and some who still reside. The immediacy and spontaneity of a Holga camera, coupled with in-camera multiple exposure technique, came to best express my vision of compelling play between the counterpoints of space versus shape and graphic versus organic. The resulting stark and fractured picture planes in this body of work refers not only to the disrupted lives and shuttered buildings, but also to complexity of current social challenges, and our ability (or inability?) to find solutions to defiant issues and problems. I will continue to visit Little Mountain, until it folds to its ultimate fate.

Russel Kwan

When I first started photographing in the abandoned Little Mountain Public Housing project, I approached it with a straight photographic documentary point of view.   That approach soon proved to be insufficient to express the displacement, the loneliness and the despair of those uprooted, and those who remain in this semi-ghost town in the middle of a major Canadian city.

I started bringing all of my current photographic experiments into the public housing project, and the sight of me and my often weird gear brought me into contact with the building caretakers, the public utility guys and some of the remaining habitants.  While my practice is not to photograph people, all these contacts have proven invaluable in shaping my understanding and subsequent imaging of this site.

The building caretakers keep me up to date on the latest and greatest guerrilla public art going up as giant panels around the site;  the public utility guys usually have tidbits of information on the future, and the local habitants are able to explain the meaning in the guerrilla public art.

My collection of photographs now include straight photography, slit-scan photography made with a modified Holga camera, pinhole photography made with my homemade Drãnoflex camera, and extra-long exposure large format photography enabled with my proprietary homebrew chemistry.  For more information on these topics, Techniques page.

I plan to continue visiting Little Mountain, making pictures, and I hope to witness rebirth.

back

to gallery

home