The Polygon Gallery launches a book that rediscovers Diane Evans's wide-ranging photography, April 30
Event that closes the Capture Photography Festival recognizes not only late artist-curator-teacher’s range of style and content, but the way she chronicled Vancouver’s public places and interior spaces
An image from Diane Evans’s series “Exhibition Park Racetrack”, c. 1979.
The Polygon Gallery presents the launch of Diane Evans: Photographs 1976-2023 on April 30 at 7 pm as part of the Capture Photography Festival closing event
THE LATE DIANE EVANS left an indelible mark on photographic art around Vancouver. Not only was she an accomplished photographer herself, she was a respected expert in the field, as well as an influential teacher at Emily Carr University of Art + Design from 1996 to 2019. She helped shape The Polygon Gallery as well, from curating acclaimed exhibitions (like Deanna Dikeman’s moving and unforgettable Leaving and Waving) and establishing its signature bookstore (which is now named in her honour).
But, three years after her death from a rare cancer, attention is circling back to her own, quietly astonishing body of photographic work. At an event on April 30, The Polygon is set to launch Diane Evans: Photographs 1976-2023, a beautifully illustrated book of her photographs—spanning everything from street shots to experimental works, and revealing an impressively wide range that wasn’t fully appreciated during her lifetime. As The Polygon director Reid Shier puts it in the book’s forward, amid Evans’s three-decade career at Emily Carr and the gallery (including its former location at Presentation House Gallery), “Not even those closest to her grasped the breadth and consistency with which Diane continued to make and exhibit photographs herself.
“This book seeks to rederess that misunderstanding and give credit to an important and underappreciated photographer.”
Designed by Judith Steedman, the art book, edited by Karen Love, contains more than 90 colour and black-and-white reproductions—and they work not only as a vivid exploration of style and content but a fascinating chronicle of Vancouver’s public places and interior spaces. Her images differ in numerous ways from the Vancouver School of photography the city is known for; as Grant Arnold, former Audain Curator of British Columbia Art at the Vancouver Art Gallery, describes it in one section, her work is “more a love for the way the world discloses itself through photographs than consistency in method or approach”, full of the “poetic everyday”.
On the cover is a shot from her series “Exhibition Park Racetrack”, taken circa 1979, and capturing a vast cross section of generations and social classes intensely watching a horse race. There’s a young couple in bellbottoms, a man with a bushy grey beard in the foreground, and even a seemingly unattended baby in a carriage. It’s an intriguing study in time and place—all the more resonant in 2026, now that the track has been shuttered for good.
SRO interior, Cordova Street, shot in 2005, suggests the rich personal history of the unseen resident of a Downtown Eastside hotel room, with calendars, McDonald’s buttons, pictures of ancient Chinese bronzes, and poppies covering the wall. In its quiet observation, it humanizes someone who was marginalized, and makes seen what has been erased. As Arnold writes in the book: “In seeming to carry the charged trace of someone’s life, the image asks us to consider the extent to which it may have been marked by conviviality and joy, sorrow and despair.”
There’s much more, including a range of exploratory still lifes of peaches, tomatoes, candlesticks, pomegranates, and tulips in clear vases. Always striking is Evans’s use of light, late-day sun illuminating pickle jars and gumball machines, or dancing off wrinkled white bedsheets.
The Polygon celebrates its launch April 30 with speakers moderated by Monika Szewczyk, Audain Chief Curator at The Polygon Gallery and the commissioning editor for Diane Evans: Photographs 1976-2023. The panel includes Arnold, independent curator and writer Helga Pakasaar, and art historian, writer, and curator John O'Brian, all of whom have provided text in the book, as well as editor Love. The event marks the end-of-April close of the Capture Photography Festival. 
Diane Evans, Untitled (girl sleeping).
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