Alex Turner | Canadian photographer, visual artist & writer

Alex was born in Vancouver in 1940, his parents having met the previous year at that city’s Locarno Beach. When Alex was five, he and his family moved to a small chicken farm in Haney, BC. Unable to make a go of the poultry business, in 1953 they relocated to a small house in Harrison Hot Springs, BC, which Alex and his family maintained for the next fifty-seven years.

After graduating from Agassiz High School, the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University of Art + Design) and the University of British Columbia, Alex taught in Toronto at the Art Centre of Central Technical School, where for twenty-four years he was a profound influence on his students.

During this time he was a working artist, exhibiting in Ontario and BC. Alex’s photographic work exhibits an astonishing range of styles and subject matter: from street and nature photography, to hand-cut assemblages, to video manipulations and digital collage.

Much of his work celebrates the natural beauty of his boyhood home--Harrison Hot Springs--or documents the Upper Fraser Valley’s increasing urbanization and the loss of its wild lands that Alex so loved. The work was featured in a 2022 retrospective exhibition, Transformations.

“I’m interested in how close to abstraction I can push the original image. These compositions seek an alignment of visual elements into an abstract whole. The results are often more like paintings or etchings than photography.”—Alex Turner

Though known as a gifted visual artist, Alex was an insightful chronicler of his life and times through his fiction. His debut novel, Toward Another Shore, co-written with his husband, Toronto author Lucian Childs, is forthcoming from Arsenal Pulp Press Fall 2026. “Sea Change,” its penultimate tale, is available now in the summer issue of the Canadian literary journal, Prairie Fire.

Alex passed away in Toronto on May 31, 2019.