Miscellaneous Photographs

This reduced version of miscellaneousphotographs.com contains pictures of my current interest, the changing streetscape of Vancouver. The pictures from the website’s previous incarnation, its parent web site johndenniston.ca along with its legacy websites dirbikephoto.com, sportspix.ca, and nonfictionphoto.ca still exist but offline. If you remember a photograph of yourself that appeared on these sites but has disappeared, and would like a copy, you can email me with a description of the picture, when it was taken, who was in it, and I will try to find it.

John Denniston, March 2020

About The photographer

John Denniston is a retired newspaper photographer who still has a compelling desire to take interesting photographs. His current project is photographing reality, not as a way to determine truth, but as an opposite to myth. A premis for these photographs is that photography is less about being creative than it is about recognizing the significance of our surroundings and making records.

John spent 35 years photographing for newspapers beginning with the Edmonton Journal in 1968. It was an interesting time to be a photographer as newspapers had started to abandon the practice of setting up pictures in favour of photographing events as they happened. There was a growing feeling of importance about the craft, that pictures were an essential part of recording history. A photographic catch phrase of the time was “the decisive moment”, the fraction of a second that encapsulated the emotion, the significance, and explanation of an event in one frame.

John’s pictures have been published in the Edmonton Journal, The Vancouver Sun, The Vancouver Province, and a few were picked up by Life, People, Macleans, and many magazines devoted to his favourite sports, automobile and motorcycle racing. In 1995 he was part of the team that turned the Vancouver Province into North America’s first newspaper with a completely digital photo department.

John retired in 2002 after 30 years as a staff photographer and then photo editor at the Vancouver Province and divides his time between homes in Vancouver and Saltspring Island, BC.

1969-1971 — Edmonton International Speedway — 2016 will be the 50th anniversary of the legendary Can-Am sports car racing series and I was lucky enough to photograph four of these races while working for the Edmonton Journal. Most of the negatives from those races remain lost in the Edmonton Journal’s files but a few I had the foresight to take with me when I left for Vancouver and they are in the gallery below.

For a while the Can-Am series was called the Bruce and Denny show with McLarens making up most of the field and either Bruce McLaren or Denny Hulme winning the races driving the factory cars. Then Bruce was killed in 1970 while testing in England. Denny continued winning the Edmonton races, and the championships, until 1972 when Porsche and the Chaparral sucker car came along. A complete history of the McLaren team in Can-Am is HERE.

There were a number of Canadians in the series. George Eaton and John Cannon were the most successful with Cannon amazingly winning a rain soaked race at Laguna Seca. John Cordts, Roger McCaig, and Kris Harrison, were regulars and even an old school mate of mine, Mike Barbour in his Rattenbury MK4B made a few races.

John Denniston is a retired newspaper photographer who still has a compelling desire to take interesting photographs. His current project is photographing reality, not as a way to determine truth, but as an opposite to myth. A premis for these photographs is that photography is less about being creative than it is about recognizing the significance of our surroundings and making records.

John spent 35 years photographing for newspapers beginning with the Edmonton Journal in 1968. It was an interesting time to be a photographer as newspapers had started to abandon the practice of setting up pictures in favour of photographing events as they happened. There was a growing feeling of importance about the craft, that pictures were an essential part of recording history. A photographic catch phrase of the time was “the decisive moment”, the fraction of a second that encapsulated the emotion, the significance, and explanation of an event in one frame.

John’s pictures have been published in the Edmonton Journal, The Vancouver Sun, The Vancouver Province, and a few were picked up by Life, People, Macleans, and many magazines devoted to his favourite sports, automobile and motorcycle racing. In 1995 he was part of the team that turned the Vancouver Province into North America’s first newspaper with a completely digital photo department.

John retired in 2002 after 30 years as a staff photographer and then photo editor at the Vancouver Province and divides his time between homes in Vancouver and Saltspring Island, BC.