Bob Cain

Bob Cain, now retired, has spent more than five decades photographing Hornby Island – its people, landscapes, celebrations, characters and everyday moments. A professional and fine-art photographer, Bob has also become the island’s unofficial visual historian, creating an extraordinary record of a community changing through time.

Bob began his professional career in Vancouver, working in commercial photography and managing Focus Prints before moving to Hornby in the early 1970s. His experience spans architectural, advertising, product, studio and portrait photography, but documentary and fine-art photography became his enduring interests. His work has been exhibited since the 1970s and published in books and magazines.

On Hornby, Bob photographed almost everything. He captured fairs and festivals, weddings and community gatherings, artists and musicians, ferries and buildings, children growing up and familiar faces growing older. His great Hornby group photographs brought generations of islanders together in a single frame. Often working quietly from the edges, he also caught the unguarded expressions, humour and small details of ordinary island life.

Over the years, that accumulation grew to more than 10,000 photographs. Bob describes the project simply as recording “the faces, activities and lives of my fellow islanders.” His eye never really switches off: as he once put it, “I see compositions everywhere.”

Today, a substantial part of Bob’s work is held by the Hornby Island Community Archives, where the Bob Cain Collection is described as a photographic chronicle of the island’s social and cultural life. His photographs are so prevalent in Hornby’s historical record that they also appear throughout other archival collections.

Bob’s photographs are art, documentary and memory all at once. Individually they capture a moment; together they tell an extraordinary story of Hornby Island and the people who have called it home.