Roy Arden

Vancouver Photo-Conceptualism—Photographing the City After Conceptual Art

Roy Arden was born in Vancouver in 1957^*5. He graduated from Emily Carr College of Art and Design in 1982 and received an MFA from the University of British Columbia in 1990^*4. The Art Canada Institute describes “Vancouver photo-conceptualism,” a term that emerged in the 1980s, as a regional context in which Jeff Wall, Ian Wallace, Stan Douglas, Rodney Graham, Arden, and others brought questions from conceptual art into photography^*23. According to Nancy Tousley, Arden studied with Ian Wallace and Iain Baxter and later with Wall at UBC, while also looking to Eugène Atget and Walker Evans as points of reference for direct photography^*24. His work is more accurately understood as an attempt to ask what remains at stake in photographing the city directly after conceptual art had made the neutrality of the photographic “window” difficult to accept; the shared appearance of large-format color photography among Vancouver artists is only part of that history.

Fragments—Sequencing Fragments of People, Interiors, and the City

The early Fragments, Photographs, 1981–85 stays closer to its subjects than Arden’s later urban landscapes, depicting people, interiors, bodies, and details of the city in saturated color and shallow focus. Oakville Galleries notes that during this period he drew on the Bauhaus, Surrealism, and the photographs of Wols while seeking a vision that was “personal but not autobiographical”^*2. The Polygon Gallery’s later presentation of the series showed that these works cannot simply be treated as a preliminary phase before the cooler urban photographs: the idea of arranging fragments so that individual images accumulate into a larger picture of the world was already present^*3. Photography here becomes a form for selecting and arranging fragmented experience, rather than a transparent vehicle for confession.

Bringing Atget and Evans’s Urban Record Together with Appropriated Photographs

Systematic photographic records of the city long predate Arden. MACBA’s Universal Archive traces an urban documentary lineage from Charles Marville and Eugène Atget to Berenice Abbott, while also noting how New Topographics, Martha Rosler, and Allan Sekula challenged automatic faith in photography’s testimonial authority during the 1970s^*26. From the late 1970s into the 1980s, the Pictures Generation—including Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince—appropriated images already circulating through advertising, the press, and the culture industry, making originality and authorship themselves subjects of critique^*25. Arden brought these two histories together around the specific history of Vancouver. From the mid-1980s he incorporated older photographs from newspapers and public archives; the Contemporary Art Gallery describes these images as “retrieved/appropriated,” emphasizing how the work asks viewers to reconsider the construction of history through photography^*1. A VOX retrospective likewise situates Rupture and Abjection as works that read Vancouver’s social history through the selection and recontextualization of existing photographs^*7. Appropriation was not an end in itself. Arden treated the questions of who preserved older photographs and which events entered the city’s memory as inseparable from the problem of photographing Vancouver in the present.

Landscape of Economy—Development, Waste, and Housing as the Surface of History

In the 1990s Arden returned to large color photographs he made himself, choosing construction sites, waste facilities, new housing, and roadside spaces—places where urban value was actively being remade. CAG describes his 1993 exhibition as a move away from postcard landscape toward a matrix of residential and commercial development and sites of waste, directing attention to socioeconomic change in British Columbia^*1. The Goldfarb Gallery likewise identifies “Landscape of Economy” as a major theme in the works of 1991–96, where the rough emergence of a new city appears alongside traces of the past embedded in the present surface^*8. His urban landscapes therefore read conditions in which land value, labor, development, consumption, and disposal have taken material form in the ground and in buildings. They do not depend on the drama of a news event. This is why Border Crossings identifies pulp-mill waste and oversized houses among his characteristic motifs of “economic life”^*9.

Why Photography—Recording the City and the Systems That Record It

Photography matters to Arden’s work for more than its ability to register the appearance of a city. Nancy Tousley discusses his work as a sustained attention to the traces that modernity and capitalism leave on everyday surfaces, while also noting that photography and modern capitalism emerged at roughly the same historical moment^*24. Direct photography and appropriation therefore function as parts of the same method. A photograph of a contemporary development site leaves a material trace that the place existed at a given moment. An older photograph preserved by a newspaper or public institution adds another question: what did the city choose to recognize as an event, and which images did it preserve for the future? With web images, search and repetition shape visibility more strongly than institutional preservation. In interviews Arden similarly discusses photographic history, art history, internet images, and everyday visual culture without treating them as separate domains^*10. For Arden, photography is therefore both a medium for recording urban change and a historical source through which to study how a city has recorded, preserved, and recirculated images of itself. That dual role remains consistent even as his methods move from direct photography to the archive and then to internet images.

The Archive Expands into Internet Images

From the 2000s onward, the logic of Arden’s collecting expanded to the web. The Contemporary Art Gallery traces a progression from his use of historical photographs in the 1980s to later works that brought found images into video and online formats^*6. The World as Will and Representation – Archive 2007 is a digital slideshow that presents 28,144 images gathered from the internet at high speed over 1 hour, 36 minutes, and 50 seconds^*12. A 2004 version documented by Ciel variable contained 10,000 images and ran for 38 minutes and 51 seconds, indicating that the work itself was updated as an expanding image archive^*11. The title’s reference to Schopenhauer is only one part of the work. Its structure—desire, violence, commodities, bodies, art, and other heterogeneous images running at the same speed—shows how Arden extended the collecting and re-editing he had applied to historical urban photographs into the circulation of images online.

Foot (#1), Vancouver—The Proximity of the Early Color Work

The National Gallery of Canada’s Foot (#1), Vancouver provides a direct view of Arden’s early Cibachrome work^*13. Compared with the later urban landscapes, the camera is much closer to its subject; cropped fragments of the body and intense color come to the foreground. Seen alongside the later work, these photographs suggest that Arden’s continuity lies less in any claim to objective urban documentation than in an editorial way of seeing: selecting fragments and constructing chains of history and desire between them.

Pulp Mill Dump #2—Placing Waste at the Center of the Urban Landscape

Pulp Mill Dump #2 gives concise form to the idea of “Landscape of Economy.” Oakville Galleries publishes the work and its basic catalogue information, making clear that industrial waste occupies the center of the image rather than the margins of a natural landscape^*14. The photograph coolly records matter produced by economic activity as part of the landscape itself, without organizing the scene around a simple opposition between beauty and devastation. Photographs on Arden’s official site from the 1990s onward treat housing, industrial areas, vacant land, and objects on the street with a comparable visual density^*16.

Terminal City and the Move from Single Photographs to Image Systems

MoMA’s Terminal City is a 1999 gelatin silver print; across the series, anonymous urban spaces recur in black and white^*15. A 2006 exhibition at Ikon Gallery, meanwhile, spanned 1985–2005 and presented archival works, direct photography, and video within a single account of Arden’s practice^*17. For Arden, the resolution of a single photograph and the question of how multiple images are sequenced, accumulated, and circulated were never separate concerns. Across prints, photobooks, exhibitions, and screens, he moved between making photographs of the city and reading images that already existed.

Within the Vancouver School—A Realism Distinct from Jeff Wall’s Staged Photography

Arden is often discussed as part of the Vancouver School, but his position within it differs from Jeff Wall’s large-scale staged photography. As the Art Canada Institute notes, the artists associated with this regional formation were united less by a single visual style than by the critical use of photography after conceptual art^*23A Ciel variable review of his Vancouver Art Gallery exhibition likewise treats Arden’s work across the city, memory, historical documents, and contemporary visual culture, resisting its reduction to a single “Vancouver style”^*18. Wall foregrounded photographic fiction through pre-shoot staging and the tableau form. Arden moved among re-edited existing photographs, deliberately undramatic urban records, and accumulations of online images. His version of photo-conceptualism developed through the reading of fragments and image histories embedded in the city, rather than through the construction of a single dramatic picture.

“Dirty” Urban Photography and the Problem of Aestheticization

Precisely photographing urban waste and dereliction in large-format color creates an unavoidable contradiction: the result can itself become a refined image for museum viewing. A Canadian Art review of UNDERTHESUN finds in Arden’s video and photography a persistent attraction to low-value things and the debris of visual culture^*19An interview in the Georgia Straight similarly presents the artist as thinking of art, images, and urban life as parts of a continuous field of experience^*20. The critical force of the work therefore lies in more than its choice of “ugly” places. Arden also brings into the work the systems of selection through which art photography decides what deserves value and what can be discarded.

Treating Photography, Archives, and Internet Images as One Photographic History

As Galleries West noted in reviewing a later exhibition, Arden continued to extend his interests across photography, collage, video, and the circulation of online images^*21The Oakville Galleries collection likewise preserves works in different formats from the early period through the 1990s, making clear that these changes in method were not temporary departures^*22. Arden’s contribution extends beyond his choice of subjects for urban photography. He refused to treat photography as a closed field of individual exposures, instead reading the archived past, the contemporary surface of the city, and countless existing images circulating online as parts of the same historical visual environment.