In the 80s I did not hold a job. I was a freelance photographer. I liked to hang out at Malcolm Parry’s Vancouver Magazine. I was there so often that many thought I worked there. Mac, as we all called Parry, had an office at the end of a long hall. His door was always open. I watched politicians, hoods, actors, actresses, boxers, business people, radio announcers, wrestlers, illustrators, photographers, writers, prostitutes, singers, punkers and even a young man wearing a Santa Claus T-shirt enter Parry's open door.
Many of them left the magazine with some sort of assignment. I got to photograph many of them.
Today I found out that Stan Persky died yesterday. I looked in my writers' files and he was not there. On a chance I looked in my regular files under P. There he was.
At my age of 82 I have very little memory of the man except that I shot photographs for some of the articles he wrote for Mac. When I photographed him I remember one salient fact. I asked him, “How would you define yourself sir?” His answer, “I am a dreamer.”
In the 20 frames of my Tri-X roll, that I surely shot in some spot in the magazine, I regret that the date of the newspaper he is holding is not sharp enough for me to discern.
Having these photographs serve to remind me that so many of the people I have known in my life are either dead or not long for this world.
A friend who calls me every day (a rare occurrence in my life) insists (rightly I believe) that he and I are lucky to have lived in that second half of the 20th century. Leibniz said, and Voltaire parodied, his thought on Candide that indeed I may have lived in the best of all possible worlds.
Mac’s door was open. I could dream of a story and a photograph and sometimes a month later that dream could even be on the cover.
While not an intellectual as Persky, I can indeed proclaim, that I, too, was a dreamer.
Sobering for me is the fact that he was only one year older than I am.