Stan Brede / Photographer Anonymous. Library and Archives Canada, Crawley Films Collection, detail MISA 12037
“Stanley Brede [was] a talented Canadian who . . . possessed a great feeling for what was pictorial, he could create a mood on the screen which said it all. He was the artist. ”
Stan worked as a photographer and cameraman from the early forties until nineteen seventy. Starting out in Calgary, working as a cigar store clerk and taking pictures in his free time, he followed a path that led him to Ottawa, where he ultimately became a well-respected cinematographer with a leading Canadian film company.
As his daughter, I was inspired to share some of his images from over the years (and a few taken of him in action) to let them tell something of his life behind the camera. This turned out not to be a straightforward task; there were so many pictures, and my loosely remembered stories tended to lack detail. It was my late brother Mike who, having left some carefully catalogued photos and notes, posthumously saved the project and got me started. From there, the Internet and Library and Archives Canada were valuable resources, and the job eventually got done. What’s here is a fraction of Stan’s work — he had a full and amazing career — but there is enough to give a sense of Stan Brede and the work he loved to do.
The photographs and some videos are arranged in albums. You may notice their condition varies significantly; some were scanned a long time ago from old prints, while others are the result of more recent, professional scans from very old negatives. I have left them mostly as they were, a few are cropped for formatting.
Cathy Brede
* This quote refers to Stan in the early fifties, when Durschmied worked as an assistant in the camera department at Crawley Films.
