About

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 premiss 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.