The dress is snow white with long, flowing sleeves gathered at the wrists, and is made with chiffon, so it is lightweight in the warmth of spring. A wedding dress, it has been modified for its new purpose, the train excised so the girl can dance away her prom night unfettered, a row of flowers woven into her hair.
A proud member of the PoCo High class of '81 - Go, Ravens! - looks at the image and feels not what-was-I-thinking? regret about her fashion choices or hairstyle but a satisfying warmth.
"The styles have changed," says Traci Alexander, "but I still remember the feelings I had when I picked the dress and that night."
Photographs have a way of doing that, which is why Alexander reached back 30 years to buy the negatives.
Remember negatives?
SIGN OF THE TIMES
The building could pass for a house except it's not situated on a quiet residential street but off the end of a strip mall at one of Port Coquitlam's busiest intersections. In fact, before the Safeway and Canadian Tire and giant billboards were erected across the street, before the skate park started drawing crowds of kids and long before PoCo's first highrise began its ascension about a hundred metres away, the home of Arthur Edwardson Photography used to be a Texaco station.
For 31 years, the business has occupied a spot between recreation and transportation, boxed in by Lions Park on one side, Lougheed Highway on another. Tens of thousands of drivers roll past the premises each day, most in a rush to get to work or get home. And while they may not notice the building or know that its bathroom still sports the original gas station tile, they've likely noticed again and again the miniature billboards outside advertising Edwardson's services and sporting photos of toothy families, adorable dogs, beaming grooms and glowing brides.
A few weeks ago, a new sign went up. Next to a photo of a cherubic infant, it reads:
"Were you SHOT before 1990? Selling all old negatives."
The cheeky, eye-catching, all-caps "SHOT," it should be noted, is rendered in an Old West-style typeface, for the sign and this story are about history.
THE TRI-CITIES BEFORE
Arthur Edwardson had long been a photographer before he made it his full-time business, always juggling it with jobs that provided a regular paycheque. Back in Saskatchewan, he and his wife, Joyce, taught in one-room schoolhouses. Once they moved to B.C. in 1957, he worked other jobs: He was an ironworker on what is now the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge, toiled at the old Flavelle Cedar mill on Port Moody's waterfront and eventually landed a spot at Scott Paper in New Westminster.
He left the Scott Paper job and turned his attention to the camera for good in the mid-1970s, basing his business out of the family home on Grant Avenue in PoCo; the living room was the studio (until the house was raised) and the three Edwardson boys had to clear out of the house when a shoot was happening.
In 1980, the Edwardsons built the current building around the old Texaco, putting in dedicated studio space, a waiting room with a wood-burning fireplace and a back room with what probably felt like plenty of storage.
Rows of handmade wooden drawers line one wall of that space, each holding hundreds of envelopes filed according to Joyce's system - "A, B, C" - each of these holding dozens or hundreds of negatives.
While they obviously pre-date digital photography, they also pre-date much of what Tri-City residents think of as the Tri-Cities. There are negatives that were processed, dried, clipped and filed before even one shopper had strolled through the doors of Coquitlam Centre mall, negs from shoots that pre-date development of Westwood Plateau, Heritage Mountain and the big-box ares of the Dominion Triangle and United Boulevard - and, perhaps, the coining of the term "big-box store."
And as thin and fragile as they are, they're taking up room and they have to go.
SOMEBODY'S HISTORY
"We decided that we would clean out the old stuff first," says Joyce Edwardson. "[1990] is just an arbitrary number to help me out, give me some space. It still isn't enough.
"I just can't do it, I can't throw them away," she says. "I've spent a lot of time pacing in front of that filing cabinet trying to figure out what to do with them... What are you going to do with them? We didn't want to throw them away but how do you contact people?"
Thus the sign - an idea of Neil Edwardson, 45, the company photographer since his father died in 2006 - and the offer to sell off the oldest negs.
And while the response to the sign his mother worried was "a little bit tacky" has been steady, if not overwhelming, he knows there may come a time when they have to make a tough decision.
"There'll come a point when we have to [throw them away], I guess," Neil says, adding, "That's somebody's history. If there's a fire [in your home], that's what you reach for."
Indeed, the images that adorn mantles and bookcases and credenzas are the core of their business, a family business in which Neil as a child would earn 25 cents per print for printing passport photos, in which his brothers, twins Brent and Keith, now 49, worked for years and in which Joyce was the salesperson and bill collector (she still is).
And that business is the stuff of memories for generations of Tri-City families: baby pictures, grad shots, wedding photos.
Examples of the latter sit on the counter at the Edwardson studio. Dating to the 1970s, one set of images shows a bride in a white dress that's cut above the knee, sleeveless, with a plain, round collar; she holds a bouquet of yellow roses, daisies and baby's breath; her veil is swept back over her head, behind a row of simple white flowers. The groom wears a grey suit - wide lapels, flap breast pockets, a white carnation - and a beige shirt. A handmade sign on a wood-panelled basement wall proclaims "Congradulations AND Best Wishes."
For a family, such photos constitute an historical document, artifacts of time and place, mementoes of people and times long gone.
For Neil Edwardson, too. "When these were shot," he says, "I was six."
FREEZING TIME
Linda McLean appreciates a business with longevity. Owner of Coquitlam Coiffures in downtown PoCo, where she has worked for 35 years, she's also a longtime resident of the city along with her husband, Garry McLean.
And when a moment needed to be frozen in time, they went to Arthur Edwardson. He snapped family portraits. He photographed their children Darren and Tania at graduation. He shot Tania's wedding and would have photographed Darren's, too, but was ailing at the time.
"He did wonderful work," Linda said of Arthur. "In a small town like PoCo, we were very fortunate to have him."
It was Tania who spotted the sign a couple of weeks ago while visiting from Penticton and bought some of the old negatives. Linda plans to pick up more.
Traci Alexander does, too. She has her eye on the last of the three sets of negs that contain pieces of her life. A PoCo native who has lived all but 10 of her 47 years in Mary Hill, she already has in her possession the strips of film capturing herself at grad as well as those showing her in period costume - "sort of a saloon girl" - in preparation for a 1989 party marking the 100th anniversary of a law firm where she worked at the time. She also has her eye on some post-1990 negatives from an Arthur Edwardson studio shoot that show the assortment of outfits she would later wear to a cousin's posh wedding in England. (The newer photos of her Maltese pooches Muggles and Zipper are digital files.)
No matter what the format, the pictures "preserve a part of my life," she said.
"Normally, people go [to a photographer] to get weddings, bar mitzvahs, all these landmarks of people's lives.
"It's sort of like freezing time."
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