vancouver's endangered treasures — a little photographic time travel

I found an old video I made about one of my early photographic projects, and suddenly I was transported back to 1997–98. 📷

I had recently graduated from the Professional Photography Program at Langara College in Vancouver, right in the middle of one of the biggest transitions photography had ever experienced.

We were moving from film and darkrooms into the beginning of the digital era.

My project was called Vancouver's Endangered Treasures.

I photographed heritage buildings around Vancouver and experimented with cross-processing, printing techniques and sepia toning. I was thinking about preservation even then. I wanted the photographs to look as though they could survive for 100 years.

Everyone teased me about the sepia.

Partly because everything looked old.

But mostly because sepia toner smelled like rotten eggs. 😬🤣

I actually tried to do the toning when most people weren't in class because I knew what was coming.

The darkroom had ventilation, technically.

Which mostly meant: open the window. 😂

And we were pretty casual about chemicals. I remember putting our hands into developer and other chemicals quickly, without really thinking about it.

Then I read a book in the library called Overexposed.

It described a photographer who developed a lump on his neck, and something clicked in my head.

I started thinking differently about the chemicals we were handling.

That experience stayed with me.

So when I later worked as a photographer on a cruise ship and was expected to dump photographic chemicals into the ocean, let's just say that didn't sit particularly well with me. 😬😪🤢🤮

After everything I'd learned, the idea of photographic chemicals going into the ocean was a pretty serious contradiction.

And then digital photography arrived.

Suddenly, photography seemed almost magical.

No rolls of film.

No developer.

No fixer.

No sepia toner.

No chemical processing for every photograph.

You could take an image, look at it immediately, copy it, store it and send it around the world.

Of course, we didn't know where all of this was going.

I still have some of the original slides and negatives from Vancouver's Endangered Treasures somewhere.

And somewhere I also have CDs containing the digital TIFF files.

🤣🤣🤣

I thought I was being very clever and preservation-minded by saving them as TIFF files.

They were about 1 MB each.

Which sounds ridiculously small now.

But at the time, they were big enough that not every computer could easily handle them.

I even made covers for the CDs.

Because apparently I wasn't just making photographs.

I was building an archive.

Some of those digital images were among the first digital photographs I ever had printed.

We were literally watching photography change.

The exhibition that came out of the project, Vivid Legacy — Silent Mentors, was shown at Gallery Eleven Eleven in downtown Vancouver from September to October 1999.

At the time, those buildings were simply my subjects.

Now, almost 30 years later, I look at them differently.

They are part of Vancouver's visual history.

And I find myself wondering:

How many are still standing?

Maybe I should find those old negatives and slides.

Maybe I should find those CDs.

Maybe I should go back with my camera and photograph whatever remains.

1997–98 → 2026.

A little photographic time travel. 🏛️📷

But there is a much bigger story hiding in all of this.

Because I started photography in an era when we worried about making photographs last.

Now we live in a world where we take thousands of photographs without thinking about preservation at all.

They're on our phones.

They're on Instagram.

They're on Facebook.

They're in the cloud.

They're on somebody else's server.

And now artificial intelligence can create photographs that never happened in the first place.

We have Meta glasses that can see and record.

We have endless pornography and images circulating online.

We have children whose photographs parents proudly shared years ago — and now people are being warned about privacy, facial recognition, exploitation and what can happen when those images leave our control.

We have become surrounded by images.

And yet so much of our digital history depends on electricity, hardware, software, passwords, servers and systems continuing to exist.

A film negative doesn't need electricity.

A printed photograph doesn't need Wi-Fi.

My old slide doesn't need an app to tell me what it is.

But what happens to millions — billions — of digital photographs if the systems holding them disappear?

At any moment, electricity could disappear.

A server could fail.

A company could disappear.

A format could become unreadable.

A device could become obsolete.

And suddenly we could have a civilization that photographed everything and preserved almost nothing.

That's the strange journey I've lived through as a photographer.

I started by trying to make photographs last 100 years.

Now I'm wondering whether our digital photographs will.

And somewhere in storage, I have a few little CDs labeled Vancouver's Endangered Treasures.

Maybe I should go find them.

📷🏛️💿

See the video in my previous post. Here are a few screenshots.