Mexico City

 

My grandmother often quoted Saint Luke, her favourite evangelist. The quote was:

"no one is a prophet in his own land" Luke 4:24 in the New Testament, where Jesus says this in his hometown of Nazareth when the people reject his teachings and him as a prophet. The phrase means that people familiar with someone often fail to recognize their greatness or value because of local bias, familiarity, or a sense of envy, leading to a lack of acceptance and honor in their own community, even if they are highly respected elsewhere.

There is something to that in me trying to be a street photographer in Vancouver. I am simply not inspired. I do know that if I were a young man and photographed an articulated bus and sat on the  photograph for 30 years, the picture would be interesting and worth money.

I do believe that if Fred Herzog returned from his oblivion to our present Vancouver he would have a photographer’s block. Those colours and neon signs he so much loved to photograph are long gone.

Before Rosemary and I moved to Vancouver with our daughters from Mexico City, we often drove to interesting towns in Mexico and even our surrounding towns had interest. I have hundreds if not thousands of those street photographs. I am now looking through some of those old negatives (because I can) to see what photographs I may have overlooked. I will place some of them with others that are indeed my favourites.

The key to taking photographs in Mexico then was to load my two cameras, a Pentacon-F and an Asahi Pentax S-3 with Kodak Tri-X. In most sunny situations 1/500 at f-16 was adequate.

Because fewer and fewer people want me to take their portraits I find myself struggling to keep my cameras operational.  I believe there is one solution. I will have to travel to Mexico or my Buenos Aire. I just might be a prophet there.