Frederick Popowich remembers a particular smashed-up car when he was six or seven years old.
His dad was an estimator and owned a body shop in Burnaby in the 1970s and, like most kids, Popowich would sometimes jump into the front seat to pretend he was driving.
But this car spooked him.
He recalls the steering wheel being pushed forward, the windows broken and the garments strewn about: There was a shoe under the brake pedal and a necklace on the floor.
He wondered what had happened to the vehicle — and its occupants — only hours before.
Over the years, Popowich would examine horrific car wrecks from the inside out and realize that collisions were a metaphor for mortality.
Being around automotive repair shops gave him enormous perspective on life. And the crumpled metal and other sights and sounds associated with the often-dramatic (and emotional) business set the scene for his future as a freelance photographer.
“It’s an all-chemical laboratory,” he said of auto repair shops like his father’s. “It’s kind of like the modern blacksmith or alchemist: You take these damaged, wrecked machines and you send them out looking shiny and pristine and new.
“It was fantastic to grow up around something like this.”
About a decade ago, the New Westminster resident picked up his Sinar and Sony cameras to capture objects that went into mending cars before they were sent back to the owner or off to the salvage yards.
Shooting in large, black-and-white format — similar in style to the late American landscape photographer Ansel Adams — Popowich selected images that spoke to him: stacked cans, dirty walls and other materials.
Two years ago, Popowich hit the jackpot when he inherited a treasure trove from his aunt in Edmonton. While she was cleaning out her home, she bequeathed Popowich with his late uncle’s tool box.
In it, Popowich uncovered custom-made body shop supplies such as an extraction device he made to remove a door from a 1952 Plymouth.
Most of his uncle’s instruments were old and well-used.
“I would be looking at this hammer and the handle was like reading my uncle’s autobiography,” he said. “Every nick, every scar, every dab of paint. You could virtually see his fingerprints there.”
And although his uncle had passed 10 years earlier, Popowich said he felt a magical presence when photographing his tools in the dark and using specific lights to document the textures and markings.
In fact, he said, the shoots often felt like seances.
Popowich, who works in technical communications, said his photo project on body shops evolves as he transposes the negatives onto paper.
On Friday, he’ll launch Collision at Coquitlam’s Place des Arts — the first time he has shown at the Maillardville arts centre. His 15 or so images in the Atrium Gallery will expand on the show he had last year in Burnaby and New Westminster, he said.
What Popowich hopes viewers will take away from his series is “seeing commonplace things in a new light. Light is a revelation of estrangement but also of the familiar.”
Meanwhile, Place des Arts will open two more shows on Friday night.
Divine Lights: Collective Unconscious is multimedia works by the design group Hfour that can be seen in the Leonore Peyton Salon and, in the Mezzanine Gallery, a photo-manipulation collection called Wood Spirits by Bob Leier.
The opening reception is on Jan. 6 from 7 to 9 p.m. at Place des Arts (1120 Brunette Ave., Coquitlam).
