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I remember driving an Ontario friend through the countryside southwest of Edmonton, near my father's hometown of Thorsby, the "Gateway to the Muskeg." As we sped by long burning rows of poplar trees piled across hillocks, she said with a start: "This is amazing — I have never seen land-clearing before. Where I live, it was done 200 years ago."

To live in Western Canada is to live on landscapes transformed within living memory. Sometimes inured to it, we have all seen forest and field peeled back, and, within weeks, strip malls and subdivisions arrayed in their place.

There is an element of violence in nature transformed so wholly and quickly, but there is also wonder in it. No artist since Emily Carr has better captured these twinned and conflicting emotions than Vancouver photographer Roy Arden, subject of a major career retrospective just opened at the Vancouver Art Gallery.

While only a portion of Mr. Arden's photographs and videos now on show deal directly with the transformations of wild or suburban landscapes, a sense of history permeates all his work.

"Remark this moment," his images seem to say, "as this will never happen again, and we will all live with its consequences."

Like any good historian, Mr. Arden has a point of view — generally against new cities and social institutions growing away from the real needs of their citizens — but this does not blind him to the savage beauty of it all. Because his point of view is more nuanced, I find his images more engaging that those of Ed Burtynsky, famous for his beautiful but bellicose shots of the "manufactured landscapes" of mines, mills, factories and scavenging grounds.

On a tour of his exhibition before it opened to the public, Mr. Arden observed that, a century ago, "News photography stole away history painting from the fine arts." History painting at its best synthesized the depiction of battles, coronations or annunciations past with a veneer of interpretation — they are thoughtful analyses, true visual essays on the meaning of what has gone before, not the mere recording of events and personages that passes today for news, and news photography.

Mr. Arden's strength as an analyst and historian of British Columbia's urban landscapes is evident in a large format print that is one of the highlights of the current exhibition. Appropriately titled Development, this 1993 image is printed big enough for viewers to enter into the details, as his telling of this story of transformation is evident only there. The foreground is a flat stretch of raw Richmond land, stripped by graders, loaders and dump trucks of its rich soil. Some of this soil will be sold off to consumers in garden centres, the rest returned back here to nurture future lawns, rose gardens and tot lots. Mr. Arden's critical phrase for this is succinct: "Land as commodity."

Stretching from one side of the image to the other are nearly two dozen townhouses in various stages of completion. There is an urban development diminuendo from one side to the other, with the dwellings on the right stuccoed and dressed up with curb appeal gewgaws for marketing, those in the middle clad only in their undergarments of black building paper, those on the left naked in bare plywood just nailed to wood frames.

Development is a narrative and editorial image of tract housing construction as an industrial process, capturing the passage from landscape through raw wood to the assuring if tacky dressings that cloak our suburban lives.

Similar points are made in other Arden photographs at VAG, including one called Monster House, showing just that on a cul-de-sac freshly cut into a mountain bench above Coquitlam, and Soil Compactor, Richmond, B.C. from the same year and sequence as Development, capturing a demonic cast-iron engine for compacting building sites having just done its business, a spanking new road and sidewalk beside it, the first of many monster houses to come in the background.

At a symposium to mark the opening of this important and timely exhibition, Parisian art historian and critic Jean-François Chevrier suggested that Mr. Arden and his local colleagues Jeff Wall, Stan Douglas, Arni Haraldsson and others, collect their images of greater Vancouver in transformation into a book. It would be a rare case of internationally-recognized artists collectively documenting one of the world's most interesting new cities coming into reality. Unfortunately, the idea has so far met with little support.