(This story is sponsored by Capture Photography Festival.)

As a festival that celebrates the medium of photography, Capture is a purveyor of perspectives and invites its audiences to challenge their own. From Thursday (April 2) to April 30, Western Canada’s largest photography festival showcases local and international lens-based art, playing homage to this region’s international reputation for photographic excellence.

In previous years, the festival included workshops and events but this year’s lineup looks a little different. In response to the current health crisis, Capture has adapted quickly to provide its audiences with engaging and meaningful content. Emmy Lee Wall, the festival’s executive director says “the recent challenges that we’ve faced globally have only served to remind us how art serves to unite and the critical function it serves in uplifting communities, especially during difficult times.”

Art holds the ability to connect individuals, deepen relationships, and facilitate self-expression. “Capture is an organization dedicated to collaboration with artists, curators, and groups to realize a collective energy during the month of April—and this year has been no different,” says Wall. “Capture continues to play an important role in advancing lens-based art in this community and providing meaningful engagement with art to a wide audience.”

Approaching photography in expansive ways allows festival attendees to uncover the many rich and vibrant layers that exist below the surface of an image and beyond its frame. In a world increasingly saturated with images and with photographs becoming a primary tool for communication, Capture aims to unpack what it means to read an image.

Capture is especially recognized for its public art program that includes lens-based work on the Dal Grauer Substation on Burrard Street, Pattison billboards, the Stadium-Chinatown Skytrain Station. The Canada Line will also feature gorgeous lens-based art displayed at eight of the stops around Metro Vancouver. The locations of the other outdoor art displays can be found online.

“The numerous public art installations throughout Vancouver feature the work of international, national, and local artists, including Paris-based Kapwani Kiwanga, New York-based Moyra Davey, and Vancouver-based Elizabeth Zvonar,” says Wall. People are encouraged to visit the public installations as soon as it is safe to do so.

In the meantime, Capture Photography Festival is pivoting to a largely digital platform to bring art to everyone in the community through its broad collection of online content. Audiences are able to enjoy virtual exhibitions, filmed tours, and talks in the comfort of their own home.

The Capture catalogue, available as a hardcopy and online, is full of information on the artists, exhibitions, and public art projects that comprise the festival. It also offers engaging editorial content including essays on the state of contemporary image culture. These are by a diverse range of writers such as best-selling author Douglas Coupland, London’s Hayward Gallery senior curator Cliff Lauson, and Capture’s TD assistant curator Cheyenne Rain Legrande.

Also featured is a conversation between local luminary Ian Wallace and internationally renowned street-style photographer Scott Schuman, also known as The Sartorialist. Their dialogue will focus on the development of Schuman’s practice, which marries the traditions of street photography and portraiture.

For more information, visit www.capturephotofest.com/.

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