Leaving Vancouver by Ferry, English Bay, 1960s

Archive & AtlasEstablished · MMXXIII

Leaving Vancouver by Ferry, English Bay, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

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Leaving Vancouver by Ferry, English Bay, 1960s — Archive & Atlas

Unattributed 1960–1969

AA-2026-4AFF9A

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He has positioned himself at the stern rail the way tourists always did before smartphones made the decision automatic, sunglasses on, back to the camera, because in the 1960s a man on a ferry believed the view existed to be looked at rather than photographed of himself looking at it. Behind him the West End skyline rises in the boxy, optimistic towers Vancouver was throwing up through that decade, proof that a city could turn a peninsula into a postcard in about ten years flat. The North Shore mountains sit behind the buildings doing nothing in particular, which was their whole job.

The rail he leans on belongs to a BC Ferries vessel making the crossing that thousands of commuters and vacationers made every week, a routine so ordinary that nobody thought to note which sailing it was. He is dressed for a boat trip in a windbreaker built for weather that hadn't committed to being bad yet. Whatever he was thinking about, it was probably not that someone would eventually study this slide for clues about a jacket.

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