Alex Waterhouse-Hayward: Allan Fotheringham - A Little Remnant of Journalism Now Left in My Soul

August 31, 1932 – August 19, 2020

Journalist Allan Fotheringham died today. Of him I have written many times in blogs here:

I photographed him many times. One of the reasons is that writer and former gossip columnist of Vancouver Magazine, Valerie Gibson, made it a point to pitch Editor Malcolm Parry a story on the man with marked frequency.

There is nothing that I can add here to what I know of Fotheringham that would be of interest to anyone getting this far.

But I have another angle that is personal to me that I will elaborate on. With Fotheringham’s death there is an almost empty shell in me that at one time was full. It was a container in my psyche that had the excitement of magazine assignments and of meeting people who in that past century were called journalists. They used typewriters, went to libraries for research, and most of all, they tried to write with some form of objectivity. They had style and substance. Some of this stuff rubbed off on me. Now with this man gone I know that I am at the end of a road that almost certainly will dead-end.

Below you will find a set of instructions by noted Canadian designer Barbara Solowan and her aide Mary Jo Fitzgibbon. These were faxed when some photographers like yours truly carried a device called a pager.

Detailed instructions on how to take a photograph for a magazine were challenging, interesting and fun. That is all gone.