Essay 578 • Feb 2nd 2025
- by Neall Calvert
I CAME UPON my first image in this series while camping in the Walmart parking lot shortly after my arrival in Campbell River in 2012. I was on a three-month combined holiday and search throughout southwestern British Columbia for a new, smaller hometown, after thirty years in big-city Vancouver. Awakening around 3:00 a.m., I looked out my rain-speckled front window to behold a scene in which street lights looked like galaxies and the whole scene resembled a universe. After that, I made many stormy-night forays around town, and then I settled here, near the quiet and wildness of northern Vancouver Island.
Neall Calvert has 25 years’ experience as a journalist, book editor, writer/poet and photographer. A former member of the Burnaby Photographic Society—where he learned to ask useful questions such as “What is the light doing?”—Neall has framed images hanging in homes and offices in Vancouver and Campbell River. His work has also appeared in books, calendars and magazines, including Beautiful British Columbia, Anti-Heroin Chic (New York), The Woolf (Zurich) and Space Cadet Science Fiction Review (Austin, TX), and been purchased by Canada Post.
Neall’s three other image collections are titled Confessions Of A Cloud Watcher, Vancouver 1986; MANDALAS: Photographs In A Water Glass; and Home Is Where The Water Is.
Neall acknowledges living in the unceded territory of the Laich-kwil-tach peoples, including the Wei Wai Kum, the We Wai Kai and the Kwiakah.
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