Bridges of Light: Otto Landauer of Leonard Frank Photos, 1945-1980

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

This companion volume to the award-winning An Enterprising Life: Leonard
Frank Photographs, 1895–1944 (1990) is divided into two parts: an
intriguing 47-page biography of photographer Otto Landauer, who owned
the Leonard Frank Photos shop in Vancouver; and a 150-page compendium of
more than 300 black-and-white architectural and construction
photographs.

The biography follows Landauer from his birth in 1913 in Munich,
Germany, to his early years and his developing love of the mountains,
Alpine climbing, and photography; his refugee years in Liechtenstein and
Switzerland; his immigration period in Oregon and the Northwest United
States; to his final settlement in Vancouver, where he purchased the
Leonard Frank Photos and went on to become one of Western Canada’s
best known black-and-white industrial photographers.

As a Jew, Landauer endured Nazi persecution during World War II. Before
moving to Vancouver at the age of 44, he progressed through a series of
careers—manager of the family retail business, vegetable farmer,
assembler in a furniture factory, shoe salesman, shipbuilder, and,
finally, student at the Northwest School of Photography. In Vancouver,
he soon became known for the excellence of his black-and-white
photographic reproductions. A selection of them grace this volume and
provide an excellent record of the construction boom in Vancouver
between the mid-1940s and the early 1980s. Bridges of Light is a tribute
to Otto Landauer’s spirit as a human being and to his achievement both
as an artist and a visual archivist of Vancouver’s changing industrial
landscape.