Rosa 'Thomas à Becket' 30 July 2025

It was on a uncomfortable chair of VanDusen’s Flower Hall when my Rosemary in 1991 strongly pushed me to a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society. I told my Rosemary, “Why have you brought me here to watch 100 terrible close-ups of Roses.” In the end she was right and I adopted her passion for roses although I vowed never to photograph roses except within an area of our large Kerrisdale garden.

By 2002 I had devised by a stroke of a hot summer boredom to scan my roses and plants from our garden. By now I may have amassed at least 3000 scans.

Because I not only had a pushy (but good natured Rosemary) and two pushy (and not so good natured magazine art directors called Rick Staehling and Chris Dahl) I learned to listen when I didn’t want to listen. These three were always in immediate retrospective completely right.

Had I brought those two Vancouver Magazine art directors tight macro photographs of roses they would have told me, “Alex go out and try it again in a different way.”

Without wanting to offend those macro enthusiasts I want to gently explain why I do not like those macro shots of roses. Because I am a portrait photographer I believe that my roses have the faces of the people who named them, hybridized them, or the face of my Rosemary who loved them. When I shoot portraits I almost never get really tight. I like to show hands. I believe that roses have hands and those hands are their leaves. When I scan my roses I carefully choose the right leaves and display them as accurately and artistically as I can.

Many of these photographers who macro-photograph roses, usually do not have them in their garden. They rarely try to find out the name of the rose or its history.

The scan today is close as I can get, sans macro lens on a camera, in trying to illustrate my point of isolating a rose and thus removing its essential personality.