Stir Cheat Sheet: 5 standout shows to catch at Capture Photography Festival
From Stephen Shore’s seminal road-trip photos at the Vancouver Art Gallery to hand-stitched imagery at The Polygon Gallery, exhibitions celebrate icons and break new ground
Stephen Shore’s Regent Street South, Sudbury, Ontario, August 12, 1974, (printed 2013–14), chromogenic print. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Gift of the Chan Family
Capture Photography Festival runs at galleries and other venues around town from April 1 to 30
THE LINEUP FOR Capture Photography Festival’s monthlong April event is set to both celebrate iconic talent and expand viewers’ definitions of artwork that involves a camera and lens.
There are dozens of selected exhibitions happening around town, alongside the fest’s community events and public-art initiatives. Here are just a few of the shows worth hitting, from a major exhibition of legendary road-trip photos to works that stitch, paint, and write around their central imagery.
Stephen Shore’s Victoria Avenue and Alberta Street, Regina, Saskatchewan, August 17, 1974, (printed 2013–14), chromogenic print. Collection of the Vancouver Art Gallery. Gift of the Chan Family
Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places
April 1 to July 19 at the Vancouver Art Gallery
Stephen Shore is a pioneering American photographer, and his book Uncommon Places is considered seminal. Here’s your chance to see that series’ stunning colour images up close, all taken from road trips around North America between 1973 and 1981. Think midcentury gas stations, vintage motels, billboards on empty roadsides, truckstop-diner breakfasts, and the kinds of town storefronts that don’t exist anymore. They’re ordinary scenes, and yet his use of colour film, large-format cameras, and intricate composition turns them into something extraordinary. With a special emphasis on images from Shore’s journeys to Canada, the 50-plus photos on display are drawn entirely from a major Chan Family donation, and include works never previously exhibited.
Simranpreet Anand, Softness in the Sikh Home, 2024, embroidered framed photographs. Courtesy of the Artist.
Photo by Erin Kirkland, Michigan Photography
Simranpreet Anand: Living With the Eternal
April 18 to August 23 at The Polygon Gallery
Including everything from framed embroidered photographs to textiles that integrate imagery, Simranpreet Anand’s work with camera and lens melds with a broader use of materials and media. This installation for Capture Fest focuses on a domestic space set up like a living room, with a vintage floral-print sofa and a flat-screen TV; nearby, LED signs flash. In Living With the Eternal, the Lind Prize–winning artist explores the commodification of spirituality, drawing on Sikh perspectives and traditions. The show is an opportunity to stretch your notions about what photographic art is, and to discover a rising voice on the local scene.
Marian Penner Bancroft, Sansum Narrows, 2025, chromogenic print. Courtesy of the Artist
Marian Penner Bancroft: Long Story
To May 2 at the West Vancouver Art Museum
From extreme close-ups of ginkgo leaf stems to a view of long-abandoned pilings on a B.C. Interior lakefront, Marian Penner Bancroft’s collection of images dates as far back as 2000 and both revels in the beauty of nature and captures humanity’s footprint upon it. With chromogenic prints joining videos and wall texts, the exhibition explores colonial and environmental impacts, the human cultivation of dahlias and bluebells, and, in the case of the rippling, bubbling, deep-blue water in Sansum Narrows, the meditative, the timeless, and the unmistakably West Coast.
Angela Grossmann, Untitled, n.d., oil on vintage carte de visite. Courtesy of the Artist and Equinox Gallery
Angela Grossmann and Eadweard Muybridge
April 16 to May 16 at Equinox Gallery
At the Equinox, celebrated Vancouver artist Angela Grossmann creates new works out of found cartes de visite—small photographic portraits popular in the 1800s that can be described as the original selfies. In Grossman’s pieces, rendered in oil over the images, ghostlike figures, movement, and gesture blur time and identity. Here, these works appear alongside those of motion-picture trailblazer Eadweard Muybridge: his 1887 series “Animal Locomotion” is made up of etched photo prints, or photogravures, that sought to capture bodies in motion through sequential frames. Still images of a woman lifting and pouring out the contents of a water jug, or of another, wearing a Victorian dress with a big bustle skirt, and turning and lowering to curtsy, seem to move forever in a limbo beyond time.
Sharyn Yuen’s Wedding 1932, from the Jook Kaak series, 1986, photo emulsion, graphite, handmade paper. City of Burnaby Permanent Art Collection.
Sharyn Yuen: Suspended in Time
To July 7 at Burnaby Art Gallery Offsite at McGill Library
Sharyn Yuen’s moving series “Jook Kaak” takes its name from Cantonese slang used to describe a Chinese person born or raised in a Western country who stubbornly hangs on to “old-fashioned” ways. The photo- and text-based artworks, conjured on textural handmade paper, document the artist’s trip to her ancestral village of Namcheng, China, in 1986—echoing her parents' movement between Canada and China, before and after World War II. Faded and artfully altered sepia portraits stress the strength of family bonds despite geographical distance, and the joy of discovering one's ancestral homeland. At other moments, the handwritten words capture the emotion and pain of the diaspora: separation, loss, the feeling of being caught between cultures, and a longing for what’s been left behind. 
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