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Looking at my photographs, on the surface they may seem quite different; the man in the barn (my uncle Lewis), the organ keys, the machinery and workers at the local machine shop, the Okanagan landscapes - all of these were discovered in my travels around the valley. The one common thread running through is that the subject matter is quite old. The barn, the organ, the machine shop equipment, and the earth and lake are all marked by time. I feel compelled to seek out the picturesque and the faded industrial marvels around me and record them with my camera. Although the majority of my personal work is landscape, I have always felt a connection to the industrial land- scape. Years ago, my father operated an auto body shop and as a teenager I used to help out from time to time. Places like Monashee Manufacturing, where some of these photographs were made, reminded me of the grinding, hammering and welding. At Monashee they are reshaping raw pieces of metal into something new, as my dad straightened out crumpled metal to make it look new again. I have always felt an intimate connec- tion to the landscape, a source of inspiration for me, a place that I can wind down and experience the beauty in nature. It's a place where I can contemplate my surroundings and just be in awe of them. Translating what I see and feel onto a piece of paper is no easy task. The best I can do is an interpretation of what I see and not an exact rendering, which is why I love to shoot in black and white - it leaves something up to the viewer's imagination while studying the print. I love the colours that I see in the world around me, but my passion has been to create images in black and white. When I first started my newspaper career, I shot all my assignments in black and white. On days off and holidays, I loved nothing more than to load my Nikons with Kodachrome slide film and find interesting things to make pictures of in colour. As my artistic vision matured, I started to appreciate the black and white medium more and more, while interestingly, my newspaper assignments had shifted to the use of colour and now digital images. I was inspired by the work of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Henri Cartier Bresson; particularly their use of black and white film, beautiful compositions and dramatic lighting. One of the things that I have had to learn is to "see" in black and white. I found it difficult at first to translate what I saw in colour into black and white imagery. I was so used to visualizing my pictures in colour. With time and practice, I think I have learned to see a little of what these great master photographers saw in their own world, but I'm still learning to see something new every day. Gary Nylander, born in Victoria, BC, in 1958, began his interest in photography when he was 15 years old and started as a photographer at a weekly newspaper, the Goldstream Gazette in 1976. After a four-year stint at the Brampton Daily Times, he returned to BC in 1983 as a staff photojournalist at Kelowna's Daily Courier. Gary has received numerous awards and special recogni- tion including the 2003 Canadian Press News Picture of the Year, and had his work displayed in the collection of the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University. His photographs have been the subject of various one-man and group exhibits. He is currently represented by the Art Ark in Kelowna.

Gary Nylander: Black and White, Landscape and Machine