As I attempt to thin out my files I always end up with a few that I feel unable to throw away. These two photographs are from a file labeled “Young Girl with Horse”. I have no memory of who she is or for what publication I photographed her.

There is something about the innocence (only my personal perception of that) of this girl with her horse that affects me and brings me a smile in tough times like the ones we are all living in. I don’t feel guilty about having taken this photograph and that I approached the assignment from the point of view of that cliché that it is of a girl and her horse.

Those who live in Vancouver would instantly comment (if only they could) that she was from a wealthy and privileged family as the photograph was obviously taken in that refined but country neighbourhood called Southlands inVancouver.

Can there be a difference with the simple innocence of a girl who is privileged from that of one that is not?

These two photographs take me back to Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, Mexico when I was 15. In that privileged American mining town run by American Smelting and Refining Company my mother (who taught at the school for the children of the company’s engineers and administrators) and I lived up on a hill that had security that prevented the masses from the town below from infringing on our way of life.

I owned a horse. It was almost exhilarating to ride him into the desert brush with my friends who also had horses. I was not concerned about politics or crime and I admired girls my age from afar. I was much too shy to talk to them.

All that comes into my head in a rush, as I stare at the pictures of this young girl and her horse. I can never go back to my own personal innocence of an age like hers.

I can only hope that she too remembers when she posed for this old man with her lovely horse and keeps that memory of innocence to protect her from the travails of our present day.