Vancouver Sun photographer was focused, fearless
Mark van Manen would do most anything to get a photo.
Hang out of a helicopter, hundreds of feet in the air. Rearrange somebody ’s apartment. Argue with the U.S. Secret Service about how close he could get to the president.
Then there was the time he commandeered hundreds of extras from a film shoot.
“Mark was sent to the fair to shoot a human-resources story about people who’ve made their entire career at the PNE,” says the PNE’s communications head, Laura Ballance. “They went to Playland because he wanted something colourful. There was a movie being filmed at Playland, and Mark walked over to the director and said, ‘I’m going to need all these people on the ferris wheel.’
“The director said, ‘Well no, we’re in the middle of filming a movie.’ And Mark held up his lanyard (with his press ID) and said, ‘If you want to be on the cover of The Vancouver Sun tomorrow, you’re going to have to do this.’
“And they moved a thousand extras working on the movie set over to the ferris wheel for the most Disney-like photo in the history of the Canadian newspaper industry.”
Van Manen died Saturday at Vancouver General Hospital after a two-year battle with esophageal cancer. He was 58.
Mark Richard van Manen was born on Aug. 11, 1960, in Vancouver. He was something of a boy wonder as a photographer, landing a job at The Sun before his 20th birthday.
“He spent his whole life there,” said former Sun photographer Bill Keay. “I remember him coming in the first day. Somehow he got friendly with (photographer) Brian Kent, and Brian Kent said, ‘Go on in.’ So he came in, and (head photographer) Charlie Warner said, ‘Take him to the darkroom and see what he knows.’”
Keay laughs: “And a star was born.”
Van Manen was irrepressible, and utterly fearless. When he was sent to take a photograph of boxer Mike Tyson at the airport, Tyson was so incensed that he trashed van Manen’s camera. He was undeterred, filing a shot of Tyson attacking a BCTV cameraman. He would make people pose for shot after shot until he got it right. One time he was tapped to photograph Nivek Ogre, the singer in Vancouver’s gloom-and-doom noisemeisters Skinny Puppy.
Van Manen wanted him to smile. Ogre said he didn’t want to, that wasn’t his image. Van Manen cajoled him again and again (“C’mon pal, just a little smile, c’mon pal”) for several minutes until it got so ridiculous that Ogre laughed. And van Manen got his photo.
“He was never early for anything, but oh my God, he turned everything off when he did a picture,”