Goran Basarić: City Pastoral: Leisure Time in the Liminal City

Gallery 881 is excited to present City Pastoral: Leisure Time in the Liminal City by Vancouver-based photographer and cinematographer Goran Basarić, on view October 1–14, 2025. With a filmmaker’s eye, Basarić transforms Vancouver’s coastline into a panoramic narrative of leisure, ritual, and place.

Along the razor-thin boundary of Vancouver’s historic seawall, the threshold where city meets ocean, Basarić’s panoramic photographs transform this passage into a stage for everyday life. Known as the “Terminal City,” Vancouver is reimagined here at its very margin, where land slips into the Pacific.

Begun more than three decades ago and continuing to this day, City Pastoral captures an ever-evolving portrait of life along the city’s shoreline. With his vintage Soviet Horizont analog camera, Basarić renders leisure as “extravagant normalcy,” revealing the poetic tension between urban habit and expansive horizon.

The exhibition includes 11 finished works with panoramic photographs taken between 2000 and 2024. Seen together, they affirm Basarić’s ongoing vision: to capture the fleeting yet enduring rhythms of life along Vancouver’s liminal threshold—a collective playground where the city meets the sea.

GALLERY 881

881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
gallery881.com
@gallery881_

CITY PASTORAL: LEISURE TIME IN THE LIMINAL CITY
by Goran Basarić

Exhibition
October 1 - October 14, 2025

Opening Reception
Thursday, October 2, 2025 from 6 - 9pm

EXHIBITION STATEMENT

There is a sublime quiet that falls upon a scene like Goran Basarić’s Ferry Heading Out—a slow roll of beauty that moves through the frame as sturdily and as gently as the small passenger ferry put-putting its way west. In the distance, rainclouds loom large over this last long stretch of Vancouver, but no matter. Nothing is going to get in the way of wherever this determined vessel is going. Such an intrepid spirit marks many of the scenes in Basarić’s cinematic-style panoramic photographs included in the collection, City Pastoral. But he didn’t start off seeing this way, which may be part of Basarić’s advantage for picturing this Pacific city the way he does.

Basarić was born in an older version of Belgrade, and came of age as the sun was setting on Tito’s liberal period of independent socialism and Yugoslavia’s political middle way. By the 1990s, market restrictions and ethnic rivalries would break the country, but for this moment, youth-struck, Basarić lived in his own creative paradise. He did his degree in Cinematography at Belgrade’s prestigious Faculty of Dramatic Arts under the influence of a new generation of directors dealing more openly with the diminishing stature of their fragile country. Change was picking up speed. There was still inspiration at the center but trouble was crowding the edge of the frame.

In an early series of photographs, Restaurant FDU, Basarić put his camera in the thick of his generation’s cafeteria, or coffeehouse, scene. The photographs are shot in dirty blacks and ashtray greys and are lit like an interrogation room in a film-noir movie. In the gloom, cigarettes are waved about like weapons as the students talk darkly of their dreams. The mood of the pictures manages to match the mood in these rooms. Already Basarić was gaining hold of his camera and making his style be part of the story.

Mindful of the documentary photography tradition of the great Magnum photographers, Basarić took to the streets for inspiration. Bresson’s smart-eye strategy for the “decisive moment,” when serendipity strikes gold, led him to pan and scan many of Belgrade’s crowded streets, but little stood out for him. The light was dull and he felt too closed in by the past. It would take an old camera and a new city to let his talent break free.

All of Basarić’s panoramic photographs in this collection show the full stretch of vision he’s able to achieve with his Horizont camera. Dating to the Soviet Union in the 1960s, the Horizont is an all-metal mechanical swing-lens panoramic camera. It is similar to the Japanese Widelux, but the Horizont, being of Soviet vintage, is a little more capricious in its working. You never know what will turn up in the frame by the time the shot is done. Basarić has come to rely on the built-in unpredictability of the Horizont.

He has used the Horizont to greatest effect in the wide open spaces of his adopted city of Vancouver, an idyllic spot nestled between mountains and water. The panoramic frame commands attention in the same manner as does a stage. Against the draping natural beauty of this setting, fickle actors set out in play.

But this is theatre of the ordinary and everyday. Basarić has a sure touch for putting Canadians in their proper place. Just like it took the Swiss-born Robert Frank to make an American look like an American, it takes an expatriate Serbian to let Canadians play by their own rules.

And what of this place he calls City Pastoral? The scenes may be poetic but they’re not soft; there is a lyrical rhythm to Basarić’s photographs that feels very solid and keenly observed. As meditations on the nature of social environments, certainly the term “pastoral” should be taken in stride. These are 21st-century urban Canadians going about their business, not country gentlemen lolling about in a Constable painting. Leisure rarely looked less leisurely. In the quick of these passing moments, Basarić captures the peaceable freedom possible in these public spaces. Basarić refers to the “extravagant normalcy” of these scenes and that idea hits the mark. In all these quotidian places, he makes the commonplace appear compelling.

Basarić’s collection has many charms. The formal bride coming up the long sweep of sandy beach stairs is a decidedly West Coast version of elegant. The shirtless boys riding the back of the BC Ferry, dumbstruck by sunshine and grandeur. The bicyclist balanced between land and ocean, casually needling his way through the surf. Everyone rises a little above themselves to meet the challenge of these monumental spaces. And then slipping in among all the long shadows is Basarić himself—the lucky participant who, by chance and determination, put himself in the right place at the right time.

ARTIST BIO

Goran Basarić was born in Yugoslavia in 1962, and took his degree in Cinematography from Belgrade’s prestigious Faculty of Dramatic Arts. His career since has spanned a range of positions including photojournalist, picture editor, adjunct professor, and independent cinematographer. In 1994, Basarić emigrated to Vancouver, Canada, where he has built a successful career in the city’s film industry.

Through this time, Basarić has developed a succession of photographic essays that give poetic value to his keen understanding of how people reveal themselves in light and space. His work is known for both its scale and intimacy. All of Basarić’s photographs are marked by his respect for the discipline of the “decisive moment” and the tradition of street photography exemplified by Bresson, Doisneau, and the great Magnum photographers.

Basarić’s photographic collections have been exhibited in both Canada and Europe. His first exhibition, Restaurant FDU, opened as a solo show at the Happy Gallery in Belgrade in 1987. His exhibition Big Wave – Radio B92 was featured in Vancouver, Belgrade, and the Netherland’s Photo Institute in Rotterdam. Basarić’s work was also featured in a group show at the Bishops Gallery in London.

Basarić’s City Pastoral is an ongoing collection of panoramic photographs that act as lyrical meditations on the value of public space in his adopted city of Vancouver. The work has been exhibited and published in series form. City Pastoral was originally published as a feature photo narrative in Geist, a respected literary publication distributed throughout North America. The series has also been published in Re-Foto Magazine. City Pastoral debuted in exhibition form at the Roundhouse Gallery in Vancouver in 2011 as part of the city’s Memory Festival, and the show has since travelled to Gallery Artget in Belgrade.

Also in 2011, Basarić was invited to be part of Hjem. Dom. Home., a group show on the value of place and identity sponsored by Copenhagen’s Kulturstationen.

Goran Basarić lives with his wife and son in Vancouver, B.C.

basaric.ca

Excerpt From Geist Magazine (2004)

When Goran Basarić first encountered the public spaces of Vancouver (in 1994, when he emigrated from Yugoslavia with his wife), he remembered the pictures he used to look at on the trains that took him to the Adriatic coast of Yugoslavia when he was a child, and every year his parents would send him with other skinny kids (as he tells it) to summer camp, where his health would be improved by the salubrious coastal air. The train left Belgrade in the evening, so it was dark outside, and the photographs on the walls of the coaches were the only thing to look at. They were black-and-white scenic views of resorts and tourist destinations: seascapes, castles, monuments and forts, and they had deep skies filled with billowing white clouds; in the morning he would awaken to the smell of the seaside and the coastal vegetation and the low warm sun burning in from the east.

It was a magical time, and he was recalled to it by a certain extravagance of the scene in Vancouver when he went with his infant son to walk in the parks in the late afternoon; he could feel the nearness of the ocean of that time long ago, and a sense of a slightly ludicrous juxtaposition of the two coastal places.He was a photographer, and so it was natural for him to consider the appearances that put him in such a mindful state: the wide-angle spread of foliage and low sky, the great embrace of late-day shadows in the northern light (an embrace in which his own silhouette was to be found, outlined in light), and the autonomous demeanour of the people who inhabit or rather are to be seen passing through those spaces: wedding couples, skateboarders, cyclists, runners, strollers, teenagers and children: all more or less oblivious to each other, acting out their leisure scripts in worlds of their own. - Mandelbrot

“City Pastoral – Public Photography”
Photo Narrative, Geist Magazine, 2004