John dowler

10/19/2025

06/13/2025

Trump will be in Canada soon. Let’s give him the welcome he deserves...

02/08/2023

Intersection • This is a portrait of an intersection, blending dozens of individual shots. It’s also the intersection of several threads of my image making: long exposures in daylight with intentional camera movement; abstraction; large format; breaking the fourth wall; white space. This print is about eight feet wide at full resolution.

Ideally, the viewer’s perception is raised to a kind of ‘meta-moment’, where people who were separated by as much as an hour become simultaneous, and each character is shown in a slightly longer envelope of time that we normally can’t see with the unaided mind.

The big challenge is fitting this big picture into this tiny medium. Let me know if you think video is a good solution.

Send a message to learn more

09/17/2022

We work in the same office.

07/26/2021

Four years ago today BC Timber Sales called off their plan to include Bowen Island in a Forest Stewardship Plan, which would have put us on the road to logging here. People throughout the community were united by our love for the forests and won that retreat. Here’s a portrait I took at our celebration a couple of days later.

Today I’m wondering: how much of Bowen we should preserve as natural habitat, and how we can do that?

PS:

A widespread campaign in our community sprang up overnight when BCTS first announced public consultation into the scheme. Islanders sent letters, planned a march, contacted governments, created online and print infographics and reached off island to interested people there as well. Suddenly BCTS announced they wouldn’t include Bowen in the Forest Stewardship Plan to avoid missing their deadline for the plan as a whole. They knew quicksand when they saw it.

Since then, Metro Parks created a new park on Dorman Point. The Bowen Conservancy created an oceanside preserve at Cape Roger. A new park is about to be formalized surrounding Grafton Lake. So, some real progress.

At the same time, there are threats of old growth logging on Gambier Island, there is a blockade of old growth logging at Fairy Creek and other sites, and we see forests burning across the continent. Large swaths of Bowen Island remain in the Timber Harvest Land Base, awaiting the day when BCTS returns with a stronger resolve.

Roughly 17% of Bowen has some form of preservation. In addition, about 30% of the island is Crown Land without preserved status. Four years ago we realized how deeply we all cared about our forest. So how much of Bowen should we preserve as natural habitat? If we know that, we can begin a long-term strategy to achieve it.

06/15/2021

Concrete to Celestial
• a wide moment of time, people seeming to move from a kind of liquid into the mist at the gothic Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia in Barcelona.

06/15/2021

Concrete to Celestial
• a wide moment of time, people seeming to move from a kind of liquid into the mist at the gothic Catedral de la Santa Creu i Santa Eulàlia in Barcelona.

06/03/2021

Empty Shoes
A spontaneous memorial outside the Richmond Arts Centre
June 1 2021