Take a walk down Grey Cup memory lane at this Vancouver exhibit of our photos

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A photograph exhibit at the Grey Cup Festival offers up an insider’s look at past CFL championship games in Vancouver.

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Gerry Kahrmann, in particular, gives you a chance to go well behind the scenes.

Vancouver Sun and The Province research librarian Carolyn Soltau culled together 90 or so photos from the various Cups held in Vancouver and they’re on display free of charge at the Vancouver Convention Centre this week. The majority, as Soltau points out, are from the files of The Sun and The Province. Soltau also interviewed photographers to get the backstories on some of the pictures.

That included Kahrmann, 64, who left Postmedia News’s Vancouver newspapers in 2019 after a 36-year career. He worked his first Cup in 1983, which saw the B.C. Lions eke out an 18-17 win over the Toronto Argonauts at B.C. Place. The dome had only opened a few months earlier.

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Photographers were still shooting traditional film then, and Kahrmann, who was working for the wire service United Press that day, was stationed in a makeshift dark room underneath the stands. He was processing film and making prints as quickly as possible, so that pictures could be sent out to the various papers across the country in time to make their deadlines.

“You didn’t see any of the game. We had film-runners who would bring the film back and you had to keep processing film,” Kahrmann recalls. “You didn’t see anything. You heard it. You could tell when something big happened because you could hear it from the level of the crowd. And then it was, ‘Oh, I wonder what’s going to show up on the next roll of film?’

“It was hectic and it was also interesting, because the photo editor wanted all the right images but also knew that we couldn’t overshoot because we could only process four rolls of film at a time. You had be really cognizant of when the film-runner came to pick up your roll or two rolls that you had the key storytelling moments in those 36 or 72 frames because that’s all you had.”

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The exhibit is a quaint stroll down CFL memory lane, with some photographer play-by-play added for good measure. For instance, there’s a picture by Postmedia’s Arlen Redekop of Calgary Stampeders linebacker Juwan Simpson hoisting the Cup just as it’s about to break apart moments after Calgary’s 20-16 victory over the Hamilton Tiger-Cats in the 2014 Cup.

“I didn’t notice it at the time I was shooting, as I was paying attention to the facial expressions and capturing those,” Redekop told Soltau of the broken trophy. “It wasn’t until I was editing that I realized what I had captured. It was a bit lucky, but taking good photos can be just that: luck. That, and anticipation.”

Or there’s Redekop’s photo of the Lions lifting kicker Lui Passaglia after their 26-23 win over Baltimore in the 1994 Cup. Passaglia, the Vancouver product who remains the Lions’ most beloved player, had booted the winning 38-yard field goal on the final play of the game.

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“It was an honour to photograph Lui hoisting the Cup. A local boy reaching a pinnacle in his career and who I watched playing as I grew up,” Redekop said.

There’s also some photographer how-tos presented as part of the exhibit.

Jason Payne, who like Redekop remains on staff at Postmedia, told Soltau: “The trick with shooting football is to get into a strategic position on the field where action is coming toward the camera. The photographer has more freedom of movement on the football field, compared with shooting other sports like hockey, where you can be restricted to one spot. A photographer needs to anticipate, to move up and down the field, to be ahead of the action.”

Kahrmann hopes the exhibit jogs some history for CFL fans.

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“I’m sure that there are people who become so enmeshed in watching the game that it’s like being a photographer there — it all becomes a giant blur by the end,” Kahrmann reasoned. “I’m sure it’s nice to look back at later times and have things trigger. It’ll be like, ‘Oh, I remember that.’ You’ll remember that you were getting some popcorn when that happened or you’ll remember who you were with or whatever it may be.”

Maybe, in some cases, you’ll even remember seeing it on the front page of the newspaper the next day.

SEwen@postmedia.com

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