Brian’s relationship with photography dates back some 45 years, when his mother gifted him her Kodak box camera during a summer vacation. He was thirteen when he held that rather magical gift. Brian still has that box camera, and it still contains the same magic to this day.
Between that time and now Brian has exhibited his photography in numerous group shows at various local Vancouver galleries, with a number of his images held in permanent collections by such corporations as Air Canada and displayed in venues such as Vancouver’s Vancouver on Robson Street. Brian has produced and assisted with numerous multi-media presentations at various venues including the Unitarian Church and The Robson Square Media Center. He has taught photography on all levels for fourteen years as the Coordinator of Photography for the Burnaby Continuing Education Program (and still teaches photography out of his home).
Brian has worked as a professional photographer specializing in on-location commercial work utilizing large format cameras, owned a successful photography business where he and his (ex)wife specialized in high-end wedding and portraiture photography using both medium and large format camera, and as well was the official photographer for the Breast Cancer Foundation covering events for a number of years while operating their business.
Brian is one of the founding members of the ‘Group of Eight – Saturday Night Slide Show’, and although it has evolved over the last thirty-five years, he still hosts this event on a regular basis at his house in Langley, and the group still uses two projectors and a dissolve unit to project their chromes (slides).
Brian’s career as a machine vision specialist (applying highly specialized computer-controlled digital cameras to high speed manufacturing machines for defect detection and process control purposes) has taken him all over the world a number of times, and he has been directly involved in several innovative camera and lighting patents in this area.
Brian is currently the General Manager of Westmill Machine Automation, where he and his team are working with both levels of Government, as well as Forintek Canada, to assist the plywood industry in producing better veneer by utilizing a process called ‘candling’ where the use of a patented machine vision system (utilizing leading-edge CCD camera and LED technologies) accurately sees into the moisture content locked within the veneer.
Brian started shooting Kodachrome back in the early seventies when he purchased his first 35mm SLR, a Canon FTb … and although Kodachrome is now long gone he still shoots slide film exclusively to this day for all of his personal work in his Canon manual focus 35mm and Pentax medium format cameras.
To this day Brian’s photographs are still, as they have been since the beginning, found in the streets and landscapes of the world. He does not believe in any image manipulation, and is known for his hauntingly ‘straight up’ images of the human condition and the effects that this human condition transfers over to the earth. Brian describes his social landscape images “as nothing more than the right organization of proper chaos”.
(Portfolio photo credit - Ingrid Bird)