As France gears up for the 2024 Olympics, the L’Oeil Urbain (Urban Eye) photo festival is celebrating sport not only as competition, but as a form of social engagement. 

Jesse Winter’s photograph of Alaskan smoke jumper Carson Long working the front lines of a wildfire last summer near Vanderhoof, B.C., is so vivid, you can almost feel the heat of the flames.

It’s just one of the images from last year’s devastating wildfire season in British Columbia that earned the Vancouver-based freelance photographer the prestigious Edward Burtynsky Award for Climate Photojournalism from the Canadian Journalism Foundation.

“I’m still in a little bit of shock,” said Winter. “I mean, even to be associated with Edward Burtynsky and his work is an incredible honour.”

The feeling appears to be mutual. In announcing the award, Burtynsky, the acclaimed Canadian photographer and filmmaker heaped praise on Winter for his ability to capture the awesome and awful power of wildfires.

“Jesse’s photos take us into the heart of the battle and show how small a force we are against such a major event,” said Burtynsky.

“It’s a perspective on climate that many people have not seen, showing the profound consequences for both the forest and for the human beings living in its shadow.”

Smoke jumpers are firefighters who parachute into remote places. Although Winter himself didn’t jump from the sky, he did put in a lot of groundwork to gain the trust of the crew. That, in turn, got him close-up access — “the perfect confluence of moments,” as he describes it — to get the shot.

“What you see in that image is Carson using a drip torch to actually set fire to the forest and help create an area of reduced fuel,” said Winter. “They’re not used to seeing journalists in these spaces. They’re not used to the idea that their work is public.”

Another of Winter’s award-winning pictures depicts a crew assigned to the Scotch Creek fire in a state of physical and emotional fatigue, something Winter said he saw a lot of last summer.

“That Fraser unit crew was on their fifth, or maybe sixth, deployment of the summer, which is pretty unheard of. And these are 14-day deployments, so they’re working sometimes 12-and-a-half hour days or longer, for 14 days straight,” he said.

“It shows that despite how dedicated they are, and how hard everyone in the wildfire service works … the length of the fire seasons that we’re seeing as climate change gets worse is really, really taxing our system.”

The third photo in the series shows a wildfire as it burned north from Washington state into B.C., backlighting the Canadian customs buildings at the Oroville-Osoyoos border crossing.  

Winter shot the frame at 3 a.m. from the summit of Anarchist Mountain on the opposite side of Osoyoos Lake. 

“I was staying at a hotel in Kamloops and at about 10 p.m. that night I saw breaking on Twitter that this fire from the U.S. came across the border and was racing toward Osoyoos. So I packed up all my stuff and drove for four hours,” he said. 

“I think what I was hoping to show is that these issues are not domestic — these are global issues. They don’t respect international borders and we have to stop thinking about them as though they do.”

The Burtynsky award will be handed out in Toronto in June along with a $5,000 cheque, something Winter is also happy to receive. 

“It’s a grind making a living as a freelance photojournalist,” he said.

“Along with the Canadian Journalism Foundation, Burtynsky himself and the folks behind this award, I’m incredibly grateful to the publications that support me in doing this work.”

For over two decades, Gabor Gasztonyi has honed his photography skills.

Known for taking portraits of people, often from the Downtown Vancouver area, Gasztonyi does his best to make his subjects look their very best in his black and white images. Now he’s bringing a sample of that work to Parkside Art Gallery on April 13 in his solo show simply entitled Portrait.

“Taking a portrait is a profound privilege. The subject and the artist pursue each other and jostle to find familiar ground. They exchange hearts and share in the unease of the moment,” Gasztonyi said. “Portraits are often more about the artist than the subject, which is another mystery of the photographic image. Even though you’re taking a picture of someone, you always put yourself in that photograph as well.”

From a young age, Gasztonyi said he has always been fascinated with photography and imagery. Even as a child he owned a camera and enjoyed taking photographs of everything and anything.

He kept practising photography throughout his time working in the scaffolding business in Vancouver for many years. Despite getting around with crutches due to a childhood case of polio, Gasztonyi said he and his partner were able to run a successful business. Gasztonyi made enough money that he was able to buy a home on Sheridan Lake in 1990 where he still spends parts of the year to this day with his wife Judith Copeland.

In 2000 Gasztonyi sold his business and decided to get into photography professionally. Around this time his focus started to shift to primarily doing portraits of people to both capture their personality and document their lives.

“As you develop in photography you become a bit more professional and your eye develops a bit more. Documentary and portrait photography are basically my main loves,” Gasztonyi said. “Photography is a very emotional and visual endeavour.”

As his professional career started to blossom Gasztonyi opened up a portrait studio in New Westminister and has had his work featured in dozens of shows. He’s also published some of his photographs in books, including A Room In the City which chronicles the life of people living in hotels on Vancouver’s East Side.

Documenting the stories of the poor and those living with addiction in Vancouver is a cause close to Gasztonyi’s heart. Last year he released a documentary he shot himself on YouTube entitled No Way Out which followed the lives of two couples evicted from their homes.

Several of the photos he took during this time are included in Portrait alongside portraits he took while running his studio in New Westminster.

“A lot of the portraits are of writers, artists and poets in the Vancouver era and also people in the downtown east side of Vancouver I’ve taken over the years I thought were strong and needed to be exhibited,” Gasztonyi remarked.

Gasztonyi also included some photos of some women from Ethiopia for a project he did years ago and some recent pictures of Drag Queens he got last year at the Drag Queen Coronation Ceremony in New Westminister. While most of his work is in black and white, he chose to use colour for the Drag Queens.

One of his favourite photos in the show is his portrait of Harry Ashley. One of the main characters of No Way Out, the photograph depicts him with his arms crossed against a wall. Gasztonyi said that Ashley’s tattoos almost blend into the wall creating a very powerful image, made more so by the fact Ashley has since passed away.

“I’m there to capture the essence of his person and their inner feelings, as I see them. You don’t just have someone sitting there smiling at you for a head and shoulders shot, you need some edge to the image and a sense of what the person is about.”

All told Gasztonyi is bringing 40 pictures for Portrait, which Copeland helped him curate and frame. He chose the name Portrait to keep things simple. The show opens on April 13 at the Parkside Art Gallery with Gasztonyi being at the gallery from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. to chat about the show. The show runs until May 18.

“I’m just excited to bring the show to 100 Mile House. Most of the exhibits in 100 Mile are sculptures and paintings of landscapes, but this is more of an edgy Vancouver-style exhibit that doesn’t usually come up to that area,” Gasztonyi remarked. “Hopefully people will enjoy viewing my photos in 100 Mile House.”

In the late 1960s and early 70s, Charles Daniels — a.k.a. the Master Blaster — enjoyed a rarefied vantage point as the debonair emcee at The Tea Party. That legendary concert venue’s two locations hosted a parade of rising musicians — Pete Townsend, Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Ron Wood, Frank Zappa, Peter Wolf — and Daniels always had a camera in his hands. Over the years he took rolls of candid shots in Boston, and beyond, that are like rock history time capsules.

When he died on January 22, Daniels left behind a trove of 90,000 images. For decades they sat undeveloped, inside canisters that were stored in zip lock bags at his Somerville home. During the last years of Daniels’ life, thousands were developed with support from a small army of friends.

On Sunday, April 7, a tribute to the photographer that includes a slideshow of images he captured is being held at the Center for the Arts at the Armory in Somerville. It’s being organized by Daniels’ life partner Susan Berstler, along with his friends musician Ken Field and Cecily Miller.

“When someone dies it’s really important to remember and honor them in a way that is compatible with their spirit and their life experience,” Miller said, “The photos are a beautiful record of how he lived and what he thought was important.”

Daniels picked up photography as a kid. He grew up in rural Alabama where his family picked cotton by day and ran a speakeasy at night. Then Daniels’ family moved to Boston, where he found his first camera and taught himself how to use it. He went on to wander the streets, creating a visual diary of whatever caught his eye.

“There are nurses getting off the Orange Line, people who may be a little down on their luck sitting in a doorway, some anonymous person wearing a great pair of shoes, a very cool car parked near the public garden,” Miller said, “He captured the texture of daily life — and not all of the photos are fantastic — but for me, those pictures are as important as the stage photos.”

Miller got to know Daniels in the 80s when she was the executive director of the Somerville Arts Council and Berstler was an active volunteer. Miller recalled having no idea about his rock history until she spotted a photograph in their kitchen.

“You see in some of his photographs this enormous intimacy,” she said, “you really feel like you’re let into an intimate moment with these legendary people. The musicians knew that he wasn’t on the make, he wasn’t looking for a gotcha moment. He was a friend and had the right vibe.”

Daniels and Beastler lived in the same house for more than 30 years. After Daniels was diagnosed with a rare form of leukemia, Miller said they got serious about preserving his thousands of rolls of undeveloped film and launched a GoFundMe campaign during the pandemic.

“There was an enormous feeling of urgency and wanting to preserve his legacy,” Miller recalled, and word spread. “There are many communities of people who had been touched by Charles, people in the photo labs that he used, fellow photographers, rock musicians, dancers, neighbors.” Even musician and fellow photographer Graham Nash pitched in.

The outpouring was affirmation for who Daniels, who remained active in the local art scene and stayed connected with friends from his days at the Tea Party and WBCN. The GoFundMe affirmed who he was to the community.

“He didn’t know that his cultural documentation, his record of his life and of the people around him, was so valued,” Miller said.

As chunks of money came in, Berstler would load up another box and ship it off to Film Rescue, a lab in Canada that specializes in saving imagery from oblivion. Before Daniels died, 3,200 rolls had been processed and scanned. So far more than $78,000 has been raised, but the campaign continues because Miller said they still have to develop, scan and frame more of Daniels’ work.

For this weekend, though, Miller is focusing on creating a beautiful memorial for Daniels and the friends who supported him.

“The mysteriousness of these undeveloped canisters of film captivates people’s imagination,” she said, “And so to unveil some of those images a way to thank all the people who participated in raising the funds to preserve this legacy.”

In addition to the tribute, Berstler is hosting an exhibition at her volunteer-run Nave Gallery. That show will be up for during Somerville Open Studios May 5-6.

“There’s enough to be doing monthly exhibits for the next 10 years,” Miller said, “Charles did a lot of other work that he did get developed and that he did print that’s quite strong and beautiful. So it’s not like the canisters are the only part of the story — they’re just a kind of poetic part of the story.”

Below are some of Daniels’ images selected by Berstler and Miller. Miller shared her thoughts about a few, which are lightly edited.

Miller: It is kind of wonderful to see these moments of vulnerability in these guys when they were so young.

Miller: You get a very vivid sense of the energy, charisma and power of the musicians on stage, and a little glimpse of the audience straining towards them, wanting to make a connection with these heroic figures. He (Charles Daniels) caught the glamour and raw authenticity of those musicians at that time because he announced from the stage. He stood at the side of the stage and could take photos whenever he wanted to.

Miller: That boxing gym was a place he went to one time with a friend. It was in a neighborhood that was not especially open to black people. But Charles went with someone who knew the folks at the gym. Afterward he said it was an interesting experience. I mean, he was willing to move in any world, and that doesn’t necessarily mean it was always super comfortable.

Miller: The reality of Boston in the late sixties and seventies was that it was a gritty town. A lot of people didn’t have much money, there were issues of racism, there were protests going on. There’s a whole set of images about a guy getting arrested. And these images are capable of telling that story of how complex that time was. This kaleidoscope of images, this universe, given that at any moment on any day he could click that shutter.  Who else was positioned to do that? And who else was curious about things that are very mundane that captured his eye.

Miller: He was very close to Peter Wolfe (who gave Daniels the nickname “Master Blaster”). I don’t actually know who took it. I like the way that that photo plays with who’s looking through the lens with the pleasure of being looked at, as well as the pleasure of looking at someone else. Who’s the photographer? Who’s the subject? Is it a performance, or a genuine dropping of guard? The fact that they’re wearing these glasses — and actually you can see the photographer in Charles’s sunglasses — the whole image is a product of seeing. And Peter looking through this loop.

Miller: This was in the era before phones. So the person with the camera was the person with the camera. Everyone didn’t have a camera. We don’t necessarily know for sure that he took this, but to me, it looks like he probably did. He took pictures of himself sometimes with time release and sometimes in a mirror.

“Eskil is a tough guy,” Atle Rønningen says of the friend he was hiking Pulpit Rock with. “It’s a massive cliff over 600 metres high, in Preikestolen, Norway. It’s so popular and busy in the summer months, so we went in the spring as soon as the snow had gone. It was still icy in some places, and the weather changed abruptly all day,” he says.

It was fortunate Eskil had no fear of heights, Rønningen adds, because as he approached the ledge, the rain had turned to snow and the wind had picked up. Even so, the guys kept their goal in mind. “We wanted to show how capable mobile phone photography is,” Rønningen explains. “This was 2014, so Instagram was very new and few people knew how to take good pictures using their phone. We wanted to show what could be done.”

While he made a few minor changes in the editing app VSCO, Rønningen insists the muted tones replicate reality. “There is little difference between the before and after version,” he says. “. The scenery itself is beautiful, and we were very lucky with the atmosphere and the light that day. Sometimes bad weather is a blessing: it makes the best pictures.”

After another friend encouraged him to enter, the shot made the shortlist for the 2015 Sony World Photography awards. “It was surprising for me that the picture reached the top of the charts, but it was very fun,” Rønningen says. “Reflecting on it a decade on, it makes me want to go hiking. Eskil gives an extra dimension to the landscape; you can imagine it’s you, standing there on the edge.”