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Foncie's Fotos: Museum of Vancouver showcases work of legendary street photographer

- Foncie's Fotos, Museum of Vancouver through Sunday, January 5, 2014. For more information museumofvancouver.ca. HIS light flashed 15 million times. The short glare flickered under movie marquees and on street corners.

- Foncie's Fotos, Museum of Vancouver through Sunday, January 5, 2014. For more information museumofvancouver.ca.

HIS light flashed 15 million times.

The short glare flickered under movie marquees and on street corners. At Hastings, Granville, and Robson streets Foncie Pulice took photos of business colleagues, couples, and families, charging 75 cents for three pictures or $1 for five.

Taking an average of more than 1,000 photos six days a week for 45 years, Pulice ran a successful business while inadvertently documenting Vancouver.

A small portion of his immense life's work will be on display beginning June 6 at the Museum of Vancouver in the exhibition Foncie's Fotos: Man on the Street.

For the last three decades of his career as a street photographer, Pulice used a camera that vaguely resembled a robot sidekick in a 1950s science fiction movie. Fitted with wheels, the camera featured a steel body pieced together out of war surplus material that housed a movie reel's worth of film.

The contraption eventually rolled its way into the Museum of Vancouver where it was discovered by curator Joan Seidl.

Initially befuddled by the massive camera inscribed with the word Foncie's, Seidl recalled the ubiquitous nature of Foncie photos among many Vancouverites.

"You'd visit people who were donating artifacts and they'd whip out their family albums and you'd start to see these street photographs over and over and over again," she says.

Those photographs, mainly of pedestrians captured in mid-stride, were the work of a Britannia high school graduate who was looking to transition from his job as a house painter into the burgeoning field of street photography.

"He had a friend who was working as a street photographer for one of the local papers, and I think he observed that this friend was meeting lots of girls. Much more than he was," Seidl says.

In the mid-1930s companies like Metro Photos, Electric Photos, Souvenir Walkie Snaps, and Kandid Kamera employed photographers who snapped pictures for cash.

Pulice soon found work as an assistant street photographer, meeting many girls in the process.

Following the Second World War Pulice founded his own company: Foncie's Fotos.

With the public unable to get film, Pulice took thousands of photographs of beaming families and returning servicemen.

The business succeeded based on a tremendous work ethic and just a little bit of charm, according to Seidl.

"He would catch your eye, he would smile at you and the idea was you'd smile back. He'd snap the shutter and then hand you a little card," she says.

The card was the claim ticket, leading customers to the storefront where Pulice's wife, Ann, would match clients with their pictures.

Pulice worked six days a week, according to Seidl. "By seven in the morning he was down in the basement of his family home on Oak Street, developing the proofs of the photos that he'd taken the previous day. By 11 o'clock he'd be downtown," she says.

He generally wheeled his camera to his favourite corner on the east side of Granville Street near Robson where he flashed his bulb at the lunchtime foot traffic. After heading home for dinner, Pulice would often return to photograph moviegoers and night owls strolling beneath neon marquees.

Despite describing him as a charismatic, "one-person community engagement co-ordinator," Seidl says Pulice mainly let his camera to the talking.

"He didn't actually talk to people," she says, explaining that Pulice really didn't have time for conversation.

When viewing the negatives, Pulice's work often has a flip-book-like continuity, as the Vancouverite in the background of one photo becomes the focal point of the next picture, creating a chain of passersby.

"This is constant. No time for talk. Just smile, snap, hand the card," Seidl says.

Pulice supported his wife and two children with his craft before eventually stepping off the street in 1979.

"He didn't privilege anyone. He photographed everybody through this incredibly open-hearted, democratic approach to photography," she says.

The museum is planning to showcase 10,700 of his photographs at the exhibition.

"Any one photograph is charming, but when you see 100 or 200 or, as we have in the exhibition, 10,000. . . it's really powerful," Seidl says.

The museum has also digitized a reel of Pulice's negatives, giving culture-seekers a chance to experience the photog by watching a continuous loop comprising all 10,700 photos.

"I think it'll be the rare visitor who decides to go for that experience," Seidl says.

Part of the aim of the exhibit is to bring a little more life to the myriad of black and white pictures that adorn countless Vancouver photo albums.

"I hope that they start to see how they were a part of Vancouver's history and the wonderful history of street photography that happened here," she says.

The other aim of the exhibit is to showcase a forgotten fixture of the city.

"I think he's a local treasure and one of our unsung heroes."

jshepherd@nsnews.com