Every Building on 100 West Hastings

Ann Turner is the financial and budget manager of the University of
British Columbia Library.

Published in conjunction with an exhibition of Stan Douglas’s
film/video work Journey into Fear, this collection of four essays
focuses on one of the artist’s photographs that accompanies the
exhibit. The book includes a small poster reproduction of it in a
pocket. The original is a monumental 16-foot-long composite of all the
building facades on the south side of the 100 block West Hastings Street
in Vancouver, B.C., taken as a series of separate color photographs one
summer night. Through digital imaging techniques, the separate
photographs have been assembled in sequence and enhanced to present the
entire streetscape as a single unsettling image. The technical feat is
remarkable, and so is the choice of subject. That particular city block
is infamous as the entrance to Vancouver’s Skid Road, the centre of
its drug and sex trade, “the worst block in Vancouver.” It was not
always so. One of the essays chronicles the decline of the block, which
was once the busy commercial centre of the city. Another describes the
ongoing socioeconomic conflict between politicians’ and developers’
attempts to reclaim the area for upscale shops and housing, and the
efforts of the current residents of the Downtown Eastside to retain and
improve it as an affordable neighborhood for themselves. A third essay
examines this work in relation to several others on similar themes by
other artists. The type fonts chosen for this publication are
extraordinarily small, especially those for the footnotes,
bibliographies, and illustration captions. It takes effort to read it,
but it is worth the effort.