With over 100 showcases, multimedia displays, and public art installations taking place in and around Vancouver from April 1 to 28, the Capture Photography Festival is Western Canada’s largest celebration of light- and lens-based art.

This year’s fourth annual event marks a number of firsts for the fete: not only has Capture expanded its borders to include municipalities such as Richmond and New Westminster, it has also opened its exhibition-submission process to the public, offering anyone with a camera and a vision the chance to share their work.

To help you navigate the mammoth festival, we’ve rounded up five must-see features at this spring’s iteration.

No. 3 Road Art Columns

At Aberdeen and Lansdowne stations until July 1

Massive photographs pasted outside various Canada Line stations (and the Expo Line’s Chinatown-Stadium stop) will once again brighten commutes during this year’s Capture, though this time, three new additions are extending the exhibition past Vancouver. In Richmond, a trio of B.C. artists will present works—some dreamy, others startlingly visceral—that spotlight the city’s landscape and natural environment from street-level display cases along No. 3 Road.

Hastings: A Second Look

At Gabor Gasztonyi Studio (730 12th Street, New Westminster) from April 6 to March 13

Local photographer Gabor Gasztonyi delves into Canada’s poorest postal code in this intimate exhibit that explores the streets and various hotel rooms of the Downtown Eastside. Gasztonyi humanizes the neighbourhood’s residents, presenting them—and their homes—in vulnerable and often beautiful states. From April 7 to May 12, Megaphone magazine will also showcase portraits from the DTES community at HiVE (210–128 West Hastings Street).

Wonder Land

At Little Mountain Gallery from April 1 to April 30

An exhibition from Capture’s open submission process, Christine Germano’s Wonder Land tackles the issue of climate change through a series of raw, double-exposed images. The photographs reveal the warming Earth’s effects on Arctic and tropical areas such as Greenland, Fiji, Norway, and Samoa, demonstrating that greenhouse-gas emissions and the destruction of natural resources are disturbing all areas of the globe.

Art in Your Neighbourhood

At various locations from April 1 to 28

Shoppers strolling through Gastown and South Granville won’t have to look far for a glimpse of this year’s Capture lineup: Vancouver-based artists Joseph Staples and Karen Zalamea will be unveiling original works on some of the areas’ most beloved storefronts. In Gastown, Staples will present “Falun”, a series of collages made from a single image of a dancer that has been repeatedly cut and spliced, while Zalamea will debut “Vitrine”, a set of photographs that will interact artistically with the South Granville window displays they frame.  

Capture New West

At Telus Plaza (611 Sixth Street) and UFCW Local 1518 (350 Columbia Street) from April 1 to March 31, 2018

Last year, Capture and the City of New Westminster asked local photographers to submit images that illustrated their interpretations of “traffic”. James Nizam’s Heliographic Scale, a black-and-white shot of an abandoned limestone mine punctuated by bursts of light, and Matthew Brooks’s The Telephone Salesman, a fantastically retro portrait of ’60s and ’70s rotary phones against a backdrop of red shag carpeting, are the results of that request. The photographs will be displayed at the Royal City’s Telus Plaza and the United Food and Commercial Workers building, respectively.