With my Rosemary gone those interesting projects that we shared involving trips or simply going to Safeway to buy food are all gone. From my bed I can and do look at the family portraits on the wall and it becomes sadly evident that they represent moments in time that will not return.

I took this Guanajuato, Gto photograph in the early 70s when Rosemary and I went (we went often as it was our favourite Mexican city) with a group of my American students that I taught Spanish at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.

I look at the photograph and I remember that I was going up the steps of the Universidad de Guanajuato when I looked down and saw the man walking. I brought up my Pentax S-3 and shot it at 1/500 sec f-16 because the camera was loaded with Tri-X.

Here in Vancouver street photography for me is boring. I would have to be living elsewhere and then return to Vancouver and shoot nostalgic street photographs. For nostalgia I found out late in my life you must not be in the place you have nostalgia for!

It saddens me to realize that Rosemary was with me and that the magic moment is in my memory but also on photographic paper- a graphic memory? Are they different from the ones you have only in your head?

I remember exactly what the photographic paper was and is. It was Ilford Ilfomar which produced warm tones which I further enhanced by sepia toning it. Why do I remember?

This photograph and a few others marked my first exhibition in Vancouver around 1977/78 in a restaurant on Davie and Seymour. That restaurant is long gone but there is still a restaurant on that corner.

I did not sell any prints but it did mark my beginning into a realization quite a few years later that I might be an artist.