A neighbourhood speaks - and hears its own voice

THE DOWNTOWN EASTSIDE: HOPE IN SHADOWS

TIMOTHY TAYLOR
ttaylor@globeandmail.com
April 21, 2008

VANCOUVER -- 'I really believe there are things nobody would see if I didn't photograph them," photographer Diane Arbus once wrote. It's a comment that came repeatedly to mind reading Hope in Shadows, a collection of photographs taken and stories told by residents of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.

The book, which comes out next month, grew from a popular program run over the past five years by the Pivot Legal Society, a non-profit legal advocacy organization based in the neighbourhood. Since 2003, Pivot has been handing out cameras to residents and assembling pictures in a calendar. If you live or work in the downtown area, Gastown or Yaletown in particular, you've likely bought one of these from a street vendor at some point.

The book, edited by Vancouver poets Brad Cran and Gillian Jerome, takes the idea of the calendar a step further by building in the stories behind the images, as told by the people who took them. The result is likely to overturn a few "skid road" misconceptions, which reduce the citizens of the neighbourhood to mere emblems of its well-publicized problems: poverty, homelessness, prostitution, drug abuse and so on.

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