Lauren Stewart in our Kerrisdale garden circa 2014

 

There would have been vast advantages had I been a plumber instead of a photographer now that I am 82 and I think of all the stuff I will leave behind unless I throw it away.

As a plumber I could have told my two daughter and two granddaughters, “I don’t think you would want me to show you all the wonderful plumbing jobs I did in Vancouver and previously in Mexico City."

The problem is that I took hundreds or even thousands of slides, colour negs, b+w negs and in the last 11 years digital portraits of them.

What do I keep and what to I throw away? Many of my favourite portraits of them I have printed and framed, thinking at all times my mother’s advice, “Alex, a photograph framed is a photograph saved.”

My youngest daughter Hilary has been helping me file photographs as she has a better understanding on the dates the photographs were taken. I still have two large plastic boxes with negatives etc.

Today I sifted through them in a preliminary manner. I a slide box of of pictures of our Kerrisdale garden I found 5 portraits of Lauren that I took in the garden. What is amazing is that one of them has that extremely rare Himalayan Blue Poppy (Meconoposis betonicifolia). They were very hard to grow but somehow we had them in our shady garden.

What should I do with these five? Had I not seen them I would not have known I had them. My granddaughter Lauren and her mother have not seen them and I am sure that they have no memory that I took them.

This is a quandary.

The last slide is one that I took in our kitchen and it includes the top of a glass vase. I normally never took this sort of photograph. I did. Is it worth keeping? That horrible word “legacy” is in my thoughts and the older I get the less important it is.