Bruce, as I understood it, you were actually a fully accomplished illustrator and painter before you got interested in photography, right?

I trained as a medical illustrator at Art Center in Los Angeles. I worked for years at UBC Faculty of Medicine providing illustrations for medical conferences, textbooks and medical journals, in mainly all the wet and dry media - watercolor, acrylic painting, pen and ink and half-tone carbon dust techniques - to depict newly-developed procedures in the fields of surgery, dentistry, histology, pathology, and related fields of medicine, for teaching and publication. It was while at UBC in my twenties that I met and was befriended by the now well-known photographer, Fred Herzog who took me under his tutelage, accompanying him on frequent outings to photograph the goings-on in the street. Mainly our beat was Vancouver, but we travelled to Washington State and Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands off the coast of British Columbia.

How did you end up documenting the Dollarton Pleasure Faire? Was this kind of alternative lifestyle something you rather embraced back then or were you basically a tourist for a duration of two weeks?

While living in Los Angeles, I wanted to carry on my documentation of the street and in addition photographed the “Pleasure Faire” scene in So. Cal. - and was interested to document the “Faire” scene in Vancouver upon my return north. I wanted to contrast the Dollarton “Maplewood Mudflats” squat in North Vancouver with the more organized, yearly built Faires in California, which was started as a fund-raiser for a listener-based radio station in the LA area, KPFK. The annual Faire sparked interest in Renaissance Faires elsewhere in the state and later, all over the U.S. and, eventually Canada and other countries. When I realized the then infamous Dollarton squat was under threat of eviction after many years, I immediately wanted to document it in its final phase, culminating in a grand sendoff. Some say the floating cabins on the foreshore of Burrard Inlet had been around since the late 1940s, with writer Malcolm Lowry (author of “Under the Volcano“, e.g.) being an original and perhaps most famous resident. Gradually the cabins were occupied by other writers, artists, scientists, carpenters, people on the fringe and such throughout the sixties, culminating in its end of days in the mid-1970s. The “End of Days” Celebration came to my attention by word of mouth. I was not a part of the Dollarton Community, but wanted to document the event and in some small way, attempt to preserve a part of this time for my own archives and interest. I went over to the squat while the carpenter gangs were working on the build and, knowing one fellow, Dan Clemens who was “in charge”, asked him if he and the fellows and gals would mind if I documented the event, from start to finish. I remember joking with them, assuring all that I was not a cop, or a real estate developer or an undercover narc and wanted to document it all as I had a suspicion this might be my last chance to, as the times were a-changing. We all shook on the proposal. My only requests: that I had access to all that was going on... and “try not to look into the camera!” I had photographed the group of carpenters (known as “Deluxe“) a year before (September, 1971) at a wonderful forested Faire they constructed in the woods near Westminster Abbey in Mission, B.C. and was impressed with their abilities and the lightness of the event, contrasted with the more “formal” Renaissance Faire events in California.

What happened to the community after the authorities closed it down for good? Would you say that it really did feel like the end of an era?

After the big celebration at summer’s end in 1972, I returned a year later in the winter to re-photograph the site. All but two or three shacks remained with everything else burned to the waterline and removed. I do not know what happened to the wonderful decorative framed windows, fireplace mantles and bric-a-brac that once adorned the houses, all salvaged originally from teardowns in Vancouver’s West End and Fairview Slopes. I lost track of most residents, but would run into a few in the area where I lived, in Kitsilano. Many went to Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands and to the Kootenays, I was told. Some returned to the States. It truly felt like the end of an era. By 1980 the last of the houses had been burned or torn down and eventually, the Mudflats were returned to becoming a funded Nature Sanctuary - and luckily it’s wonderfully preserved to this day.

Vancouver and its surroundings changed very drastically over the last few decades. Do you get a sense of nostalgia or even melancholia when you look at your series - especially since the kids of today seemingly aren’t too interested in any form of rebellion anymore, even though modern life offers even more reasons than ever to do so?

I feel that a big innocence is missing nowadays with the total city of Vancouver changing in all aspects, especially a huge bump in population and the overwhelming building and densification that perhaps was inevitable. This, I believe was partly due to the presence at the Expo 86 where the world dropped by and some stayed. Definitely, more people arrived after the Expo event. The land values are now priced well beyond what most working class people can afford, so many of the communal houses are either gone or now ask for stratospheric rent. Certainly the people I knew who lived in them could no longer afford to live there. But, that was 46 years ago, and the young kids in the early photos are now in their 50s and 60s. I guess we had the “Age of Aquarius” notion that our world was changing and we - the (young) people - were changing it. The big hype and commercial fashion industry followed suit, but that was later.