Trevor Brady

Trevor Brady has had the advantage of exploring his art from the perspective of two very different hemispheres.  Born in Cape Town, South Africa in 1970, Brady studied advertising and design before relocating to Vancouver, Canada in 1993.

Somewhere amongst working as a creative director / fashion photographer in the media and design industry, maintaining an online creative photography community and magazine, Brady has found the time to cultivate the passion and perspective the art of photographic expression entails.

His photography is generally influenced by two-dimensional composition, leading him to shoot a great deal of urban architecture, detail, and an array of other typographical elements.  He brings these images to life through what he refers to as ‘Redesign’, the creation of graphical composition from an existing scene.  Brady frames intrigue through the photography of common objects – stacked crates in a dirty alley, or a chain-link fence decorated with old coffee cups – making them compelling, even beautiful, in the process.  This desire to transform subjects also extends past the inanimate world, to the rundown neighbourhoods of Vancouver’s Eastside where both the people and the streets possess an intensity rivaled only by their willingness to express it.  It is here, among the scratched windows and littered gutters, that Brady’s subjects truly come to embody the spirit of the artist’s ReDesign.

 

PLASTIC by Trevor Brady

PLASTIC documents exploding architectural growth in downtown Vancouver, with particular attention paid to the Yaletown district.  Most of these images were created during the winter months of 2006, either on my way to work or while wandering through the neighbourhood during my lunch break.

Over the past ten years I have witnessed open parking lots and worn-out warehouses evolve into high-rise condos and stylish storefronts. PLASTIC examines this evolution.

These images were made with plastic toy cameras, specifically a Woca and a Holga.  The Woca is the “high-end” version of the Holga, and boasts a glass lens versus the Holga’s plastic lens.  Both these cameras are limited to a couple of aperture settings (F11 and F8), with only one shutter speed of 1/100th sec. Since these images were primarily made during months with low lighting conditions, I was forced to expose each image two or three times in order to achieve the desired effect.  The result is the layered composite of images to the film, which nicely compliments the layered evolution of this eclectic neighborhood.