Of all the buildings at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the Kinnear Centre for Creativity and Innovation is the most prominent. It sits pretty much in the center of the campus and rises 3 stories above the hillside. The first time I saw it and read the name, I saw the disconnect. My first impression was "prison," and wondered what went on in there. But it also dismayed me that with this building, the Banff centre had become so large. Did the Banff centre "build it so they will come"? And have they used all of that space for creativity and innovation?

It turns out that they haven't. All of the 2020 layoffs prompted an open letter from some staff to implore the leadership to get back to its roots. Apparently, in order to make use of the building, leadership seminars fill the large part of the schedule and square footage. That's why this building is so interesting. I think it represents the notion that an institution must grow in order to remain viable. But when institutions grow, they require more resources and consume more.

I took the first photos with the Polaroid using paper negatives, then returned with the large format camera, then later with the Olympus OM-2. It's hard to capture the impact of this building in pictures. I wanted to give a sense of how imposing it was, so thought a strip of negatives would help.

Go to the Kinnear Center

I went to the Banff Centre to try out developing paper negatives in the field. Equipped with a Polaroid 450 camera, a dark box, paper, and chemicals, I drove to the Banff Centre and decided to park in the parkade under the music centre. But as I got out and looked around I realized that I was far removed from the national park, even though I was in the middle of it. So I loaded the camera with paper in the dark box and took my first picture of the entrance. After loading the paper into the developing drum and pouring in developer, stop bath, and fixer, I pulled out the first negative and was both excited and a little disappointed. The field developing process worked great, but the scene had way too much dynamic range, so the entrance was blown out and there was no detail inside. But I was still excited to see the negative right away. It was almost like taking a Polaroid picture except instead of "pictures in a minute," it was "negatives in 3 minutes."

So I tried to compose scenes without as much dynamic range and was pleased with the results. I tried a couple of self portraits, where I'd open the shutter and run into the picture for a couple of minutes. The first one worked, but the second one was backlit, so part of my back went missing in the result! During that time in Banff, I never left the parkade. I lingered, pondering this place, thinking about how our society created the need to build it.

Go to Banff Centre Parkade