BURSTIt’s been a fun 50 years of photographing the PNE for Craig Hodge, who says the 2026 fair will be his final year of such freelance work there.
He started in 1976 as a photographer with The Columbian, which evolved into Surrey Now and other newspapers, and soon took a PNE staff job to shoot the summer fair.
“I started working for newspapers when I was 16, part-time, and I used to take my summers off to work at the PNE,” explained Hodge, who figures he’s taken millions of photographs at the site in East Vancouver.
“It’s a photographer’s dream because there’s so much stuff happening, so many events, always so much to photograph,” Hodge raved. “It’s a very fun place to visit, whether it was the concerts or whatever. Back when I started they had the big-name concerts because the (Pacific) Coliseum was the biggest arena in town — Rogers Arena and BC Place didn’t exist yet. So, I photographed Alice Cooper, ABBA, Queen, all the groups that came through the Coliseum in those years. During the PNE they did the Star Spectacular (series) which was 17 days of the biggest groups of the day, like The Bee Gees, Frank Sinatra.”
New the year Hodge started was the SuperDogs show, set up near long-gone events like the Miss PNE pageant, demolition derby and more.
Many of his photos are published in 100 Years of Fun, a 2010 book celebrating the 100th anniversary of Pacific National Exhibition.
“When I started,” Hodge said, “we were shooting black-and-white film and we had dark rooms on site,” Hodge recalled. “We used to mail out the photos all around B.C. on Monday morning, to newspapers. Then we converted over to digital. Now dark rooms are gone and I don’t have a huge staff anymore, with changes in technology.”
Elected to Coquitlam City Council in 2011, Hodge is running for mayor this fall.
“Fifty years is a good run for me at the PNE, where my kids grew up and I met my wife (Darla Furlani), whose sister was Miss PNE in 1986 and Darla’s job was to be the chaperone.… My history with the PNE s not just from photography, it’s very much intertwined with my life.
Hodge says he wanted to stick around long enough to photograph shows at the PNE’s new concert venue, Freedom Mobile Arch.
“As an entertainment venue, that’s been talked about for 20 years, so I really wanted to see that get built,” he said. “I got a chance to shoot The Guess Who last night (Aug. 23), and it’s incredible. I probably shot The Guess Who at the Coliseum years ago, so that’s in my archives somewhere. There’s a few bands coming back that I’ve shot over the years.… Alice Cooper was one of the first concerts I shot in the 1970s, and he fell off the stage and landed in my lap. I had to pick him and he got all bandaged up and finished the show, incredible.”
Another incredible moment involved a huge elephant that Hodge photographed in the 1980s.
“The PNE decided to have a circus at the Coliseum,” he started, “and the marketing manager thought it would be great to take one of the elephants out somewhere on the fairground so we could show that the circus was at the PNE that year.
“So we took an elephant from the Coliseum and walked it right down one of the midways to the admin building, because that was a high point where we could see the fair in the background. We’d never do this today. What could possibly go wrong walking an elephant through a crowded fairground?
“The trainer says, ‘No problem, just walk in front of him with some candy floss and he’ll follow you wherever you go.’
“So I left the Coliseum holding candy floss with media and an elephant in tow, and we headed past the food building, the old food building. That’s when I discovered that the elephant not only liked cotton candy, he had an interest in the food from the food building. So the elephant stopped and started eating food off people’s plates, particularly Chinese food. So this giant vacuum of an elephant trunk sucked food off people’s plates as we were walking past the food building.
“The marketing manager started going, ‘Great, this is great! Fantastic, keep going, keep shooting!’ And he started running behind, handing out $5 bills to everybody whose food had been sucked up by the elephant. We got to the admin building, got a perfect vantage point, got a little kid with a cotton candy. We were in the middle of shooting the picture of the cotton candy when the elephant decided to answer the call of nature. It was like a fire hydrant of urine that went down the hill through the food vendors. At which point we decided we had to take the elephant back to the Coliseum. So yes, I actually walked an elephant through a crowded PNE fairground. Those are photos I have, good memories.”