Inside a Vancouver Street Photographer’s Infinite Summer

If you ever catch Mike DiPietro on his fervent weekend treks through East Vancouver, ask to see his Strava data.

His sweeping photography project Seasons of East Van — a chronicle of the area’s changing faces, clothes, street corners and seasons — often takes him on an odyssey across the neighbourhoods of Grandview-Woodland, Hastings Sunrise, Strathcona and Mount Pleasant with no promise of reward. His “big box” for walking used to be much wider, as far south as 49th Avenue, but his windows of time for how long he can spend out and about has shrunk since having a baby.

One day in June, he walked 20 kilometres and only got five photos, DiPietro told The Tyee.

Seasons of East Van has been going for five years now. Looking through the project, there’s an almost nostalgic quality. DiPietro’s photos have a film-like texture, produced in part by pairing his digital camera with an old lens.

There’s the smirk of a character here, a steely gaze there, a giggle caught in the act. Every subject’s disarmed and cracked wide open. Every object photographed feels awfully familiar and just out of reach.

It’s interesting to see what these cool, infinitely fascinating people were wearing on a random weekend in March and wonder what the rest of their days looked like.

For the 18,000 followers the project has garnered on Instagram, I imagine that a large part of the appeal is aspirational: people can use this page as inspiration for their own outfits, or even as a call to arms, to get out the door and live as beautiful a life as they can. And then there’s that yearning for a static, perpetual summer in a time when everything seems to be changing so rapidly in the city and — thanks to social forces that are out of our control — the very ground seems to be shifting underneath us.

On every post is a pretty lively comment section where you’ll also find people highlighting their favourite photos and the outfits they like the best, making interesting observations and hyping up and tagging their friends who they see in the photos. DiPietro, who intentionally doesn’t tag the people in his photos, said “It’s kind of been nice to just let it organically happen.”

Of the photos in the project, DiPietro’s favourites always include clothes and items that look “well-worn” — the clothes fit the person, but they also look like they have been taken care of and loved.

“You can tell that someone really likes that jacket — it’s their favourite jacket — because it looks worn. It’s not something that just came off the shelf. They didn’t just go and buy the trendiest new thing,” DiPietro said. “It's usually stuff that's like, ‘Oh, yeah, I got this 10 years ago. It’s my favourite jacket.’”

“There’s definitely designer looks that I've taken photos of that are great, but I would say the vast majority of stuff is vintage and well-loved.”

It’s also interesting to see how the literally changing seasons in Vancouver — from smoke to rain to heat — have affected DiPietro’s work.

“I would say spring has disappeared essentially, especially this year. We didn’t really have that, ‘It’s still warm but you can wear a couple of cool layers in spring.’ It’s like we went from winter straight into summer,” DiPietro said. “You can see that in the photos, if you look at some of the spring photos this year, everybody’s wearing a summer fit.”

DiPietro still has no idea which posts are going to blow up with his online audience and which ones won’t.

“Sometimes you think you’re going to post something, and it’s going to be your biggest engagement post, and you’re going to have tons of new followers, or you’re going to get tons of likes on it and it just kind of flops. And then other times, you just have a few photos leftover and that ends up being one of your better posts.”

But over the years, he has built quite a following in Vancouver and his project has become a household name in the city. DiPietro tells me that one in 10 people he approaches know of him or his project. He’s even caught photos of Tyee staffers.

DiPietro was recently approached by a person who had been following his project for a long time and was really excited to get their photo taken and be a part of it. They even owned a copy of his book.

Seasons of East Van has also become a community bulletin board of sorts.

Once, a person who had seen a photo of a relative on DiPietro’s page reached out and asked how that relative was doing. They hadn’t seen them in a long time and wanted to know if they were okay.

“That was kind of a cool interaction, that I could give that person comfort. Like, ‘Yeah, I recently took their photo and they’re doing okay. I talked to them. Oh, actually I saw them the other day too and I’ll tell them that you said hi.’”

Years after he started his project, which relies on approaching strangers in the street and striking up a conversation, the pandemic came to B.C. For a couple of months, DiPietro said he tried to stay off of major streets like Commercial Drive and didn’t feel comfortable approaching people for photos.

During that time, he began to take a lot more photos around the neighbourhood that weren’t of people. “That just kind of helped me develop some of my other photography skills.”

As people began to feel comfortable with human contact again, DiPietro and his lens returned to the streets.

“I remember the first few times people were just like, so happy to talk to a stranger. That was really fun, actually,” he said. “It was just that spontaneous interaction that people weren't used to having anymore. Or that they were missing.”

As the seasons of Vancouver have intensified in mystifying ways over the last few years, DiPietro has seen a few interesting effects on his photographic work.

The smoke from spring and summer wildfires have produced interesting colours in some of his photos. “We have those beautiful days where you can see the mountains, and then sometimes you have a couple of weeks where there’s no mountains in some of the summer photos, which is kind of sad.”

And because people are mostly staying indoors or wearing loose fitting, comfortable clothes during heat waves, it’s harder to get as many photos.

“When we get those couple of months of straight rain, I’m not able to get out as much because everything I do is with natural light and it’s all on the street,” DiPietro said. “So it’s hard to get the camera out and feel confident taking a photo. Or stopping people: People are kind of in a rush when it's raining, so that definitely limits the amount of times I can get out.”

DiPietro explains that despite, or perhaps because of, the time and effort he sinks into this passion project, he actively tries to keep it from becoming “work.” He loves his day job as a senior high school teacher in Surrey, he tells The Tyee, so keeping these passions separate has been important for him. “I’ve always wanted this just to be like something on the side, as something fun,” he said.

To keep it that way, DiPietro has no deadlines, and no requirements for when to post on Instagram, algorithm gods be damned. When we spoke, he said he had nearly a hundred photos on his memory card that he hadn’t gotten around to posting yet — and that’s okay, he said.

DiPietro doesn’t make any money off of this project, he said, and the project might fade out at some point.

“I couldn’t quit my job and do this full time. Ever. Which is unfortunate. I am going to have to move out of the city eventually because my work is not here, and child care,” DiPietro said. “So will it end? I don’t know. Will I be able to still come up every couple of weekends and still grab some photos? Maybe.”

For the moment, he still loves wearing himself out on the streets of East Vancouver. He wishes he could do this forever.