Teck Gallery
December 1, 2011 to March 9, 2012

Farah Nosh: Stanley Park After the Storm of December 2006

On the early morning of December 15, 2006 the coasts of British Columbia and Washington State were battered by one of the most destructive storms to hit the region in living memory. In the Greater Vancouver area the damage to Stanley Park was the greatest visual manifestation of the devastation. If the Park itself was a complete tangle, Farah Nosh’s images, especially the panoramas, give a kind of order to the sadness and chaos of fallen trees.

Locally based photojournalist Farah Nosh went into the Park on the afternoon of the 15th to document the damage for the New York Times. Her photographs appeared the next day and were picked up by other media outlets around the world. Many Vancouverites photographed the damage to the Park that day, but the world outside of Canada learned about the Park’s fallen trees via Nosh’s images.

Five years have gone by quickly - now, on the 5th anniversary of the storm, storms continue to roll in and the Park is slowly recovering, but many areas are still impassable acreages of fallen trees, especially the zone between Prospect Point and Third Beach. Farah Nosh’s photographs are a poignant reminder of the destruction wrought over a single evening in 2006 as well as a reminder of the fragility of our forests – it is not just pine beetles and their relatives that are decimating the woods but a range of other forces, many of which may well be linked to the effects of climate change, as is the case with the various beetle outbreaks since the initial occurrence in Alaska in the 1990s.

Farah Nosh obtained a B.A. in Geography from the University of British Columbia in 1998 and since graduating from the photography program at the Western Academy of Photography in Victoria in 2002 she has been constantly photographing hot spots around the world. She was one of the few western photographers working in Iraq during the time of Saddam Hussein’s regime and she was living in Baghdad at the time of the U.S./coalition invasion in March 2003. She has also worked in Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and Afghanistan. More recently, her project has been to document the remaining fluent speakers of the Haida language in northwestern BC and southwest Alaska.

Images of Farah Nosh’s photography may be seen at: http://farahnosh.com/

Join us for an illustrated talk on the history of storms in Stanley Park with York University assistant professor of Canadian environmental history
Sean Kheraj. He is completing a book on the environmental history of Vancouver's Stanley Park that will be published by UBC Press.

Thursday December 15 at 7pm, Room 7000 at the SFU Vancouver Campus (515 West Hastings). The talk is free and open to the public - there is no charge & no advance registration.