Capture Photography Festival fills April 2026 with dozens of photography exhibitions across Metro Vancouver, with five standouts anchored by a 50-print retrospective of Stephen Shore at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

The monthlong festival expands the definition of photographic work to include embroidery, oil over albumen, and handmade paper. Five exhibitions worth planning around:

What does the Shore retrospective include?

"Stephen Shore: Uncommon Places" runs April 1 to July 19 at the Vancouver Art Gallery, drawing entirely from a major Chan Family gift to the institution. The 50-plus chromogenic prints, printed in 2013–14, span Shore's North American road trips between 1973 and 1981.

The show emphasises images from Shore's journeys to Canada. Two chromogenics, "Regent Street South, Sudbury, Ontario, August 12, 1974" and "Victoria Avenue and Alberta Street, Regina, Saskatchewan, August 17, 1974," anchor that thread. Shore's large-format colour work treats gas stations, motels, and roadside diners as formal composition.

Several prints appear for the first time, giving Vancouver audiences first access to material from one of the most influential American colour photographers of the postwar generation.

How does Simranpreet Anand extend the lens-based work?

At The Polygon Gallery, "Simranpreet Anand: Living With the Eternal" runs April 18 to August 23. The Lind Prize–winning artist replaces the conventional gallery with a domestic interior: a vintage floral-print sofa, a flat-screen television, and LED signage.

Anand integrates camera imagery with embroidery and textiles. "Softness in the Sikh Home" (2024), a framed embroidered photograph, exemplifies the method: lens-based capture filtered through craft. The show's framing invites viewers to "stretch your notions about what photographic art is" while examining the commodification of spirituality from a Sikh vantage.

What does Marian Penner Bancroft make of nature and its scars?

"Long Story" runs to May 2 at the West Vancouver Art Museum. Marian Penner Bancroft's chromogenic prints, videos, and wall texts range across four decades, with the earliest image dating to 2000.

The exhibition braids extreme close-ups of ginkgo leaf stems with views of abandoned pilings on a British Columbia Interior lakefront. "Sansum Narrows" (2025), a chromogenic print of rippling deep-blue water, sits beside images of cultivated dahlias and bluebells. Bancroft's project reads nature and its colonial entanglements as a single layered subject.

Where do Muybridge and Grossmann meet?

At Equinox Gallery from April 16 to May 16, Angela Grossmann and Eadweard Muybridge share a single exhibition. Grossmann paints in oil over found cartes de visite, the small albumen portraits of the 1860s and '70s.

The exhibition's framing describes the resulting images as producing "ghostlike figures" that blur "time and identity." Muybridge's 1887 "Animal Locomotion" photogravures sit alongside: sequential frames of a woman lifting a water jug, and of another curtsying in a Victorian bustle, fixing bodies mid-motion. The pairing positions Grossmann's painted interventions as a contemporary counterpoint to nineteenth-century motion studies.

Why does Sharyn Yuen's "Jook Kaak" still resonate?

At the Burnaby Art Gallery Offsite at McGill Library, "Sharyn Yuen: Suspended in Time" runs to July 7. The series "Jook Kaak" takes its title from Cantonese slang for a Chinese person raised in the West who retains "old-fashioned" ways.

Yuen's photo- and text-based works on handmade paper document her 1986 trip to her ancestral village of Namcheng, China. Sepia-toned portraits, including "Wedding 1932" (1986), trace family migrations between Canada and China that bracketed the Second World War. Handwritten passages layer the imagery, registering separation, diaspora, and longing.

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With the festival's April programming now confirmed, attention turns to whether the Shore retrospective's Canadian emphasis can sustain curatorial interest well past the festival's closing dates.