Rosa 'Emily Carr' 2 July 2025

The obverse side

We live now in the world of influencers who are iconic and stunning and we opine on them by using emojis.

In that last century I used to make fun of my writer friend John Lekich as he liked to use the word invoke in his reviews of films.

Now in this century I will write this blog using two words (associated with each other) which are invoke and conjure.

This lovely red rose, Rosa ‘Emily Carr’, introduced in Morden Manitoba in 2007, is all but unavailable in Vancouver Lower Mainland nurseries. I found it at the UBC Botanical Garden Shop in the Garden (my Rosemary used to work there) five years ago. I cannot imagine how a rose with that name that is hardy across Canada is not better known here.

The scan you see is of the same rose that I scanned on 24 June. It has been in a little vase with water in my kitchen since. That is amazing endurance for a rose.

Rosa 'Emily Carr' & Crambe maritima - 24 June 2025

To me this rose invokes/conjures the face and memory of my departed Rosemary who never saw it bloom. Seeing it on my kitchen counter was a bit like gazing on her face.

Note how lovely the obverse side is.

Will influencers ever know the meaning of obverse?

Rosa 'Emily Carr' 30 June 2025 - Illustration by Graham Walker

The luckiest moment of my life, besides having been born was to spot, from the back, that woman with straight blond hair in a mini skirt and with legs to rival my mother’s. It was sometime in mid December 1967 in Mexico City. A month and a few days later we were married in Coyoacán, Mexico City. We had two children and in 1975 she strongly persuaded me that Mexico was not a place for our young daughters to grow up in. We were to move in our VW Beetle to Vancouver, British Columbia. By 1977 I was an established magazine photographer and between the both of us we manged to buy and move to a house with a large corner garden in 1986. I now live in little house in Kitsilano. I share it with two brother and sister cats. Rosemary died on December 9, 2020. I am financially stable thanks to Rosemary’s handling of our funds.

Through the years I worked with editors, art directors and graphic designers. One in particular is Graham Walker. Together we did quite a few brochures. We frequent avant-garde concerts and those of baroque music.

A few days ago he sent me his lovely design to celebrate Canada Day tomorrow. I decided to do collaboration by scanning my Morden Manitoba 2007 introduction of Rosa ‘Emily Carr’.

This blog is in memory of that woman who was my wife, Rosemary  and a celebration that with the turmoil in our world now, I live in the right place because of her.

Hosta 'Hirao Majesty' 30 June 2025

In 1950 in Buenos Aires I was 8. One day my mother who taught at a private American high school took me to have lunch with one of her students who was Chinese. We were served soup and I immediately noticed the white Chinese spoon. I was drawn (did not know this yet) by its simple and elegant design.

Since then I have equated the spoon with the best of modern Swedish design. 

In the late 80s I was assigned to photograph the UBC anthropology professor (he was accused of several crimes including murder). I wrote about it, (link below) as I had to ask him why the Japanese had copied Chinese characters but not the spoon. His answer was a simple one, “Cultures adopt from other countries only what interests them.”

Cyril Belshaw &the Wondrous Chinese Spoon 

At my door I have a large shine green hosta from Japan called Hirao Majesty. Unlike many other hostas that grow their flowers on scapes (the hosta term for stem) either in clusters at the end or many flowers down the scape, this one has one single and for me extremely elegant flower. It is particularly lovely before it opens.

Scan of Rosa 'Double Delight' 30 June 2025 with photograph taken with Fuji X-E1 and a Lensbaby

Rosa 'Mrs. Oakley Fisher' 30 June 2025 - scan

I believe that because I have been a photographer since 1958 and a magazine photographer since 1977 that I can see what is coming and what is disappearing.

I have written several blogs on the loss of style. I have and identifiable style not because of personal merits but because pushy magazine art directors made me do what I did not want to do and they were invariably right. Photographers now without any push take pictures in almost complete isolation.

The extreme telephoto lenses gave us tight shots of eagle heads. I think that this sort of photography will disappear with Artificial Intelligence.

 Artificial Intelligence - My Take

The macro lenses and phones with macro capabilities give us very good close-ups of flowers. Here is where I will insert my small beef.

In that world of garden enthusiasm in the l 90s of that last century people who had good gardens would say, “I like plants.” They would never say, “I like flowers.” People who grow roses never say, “rose bushes.” The simply say, “I have these roses.” And people involved in gardening, like my Rosemary was, always used the botanical name for plants. Thus a Pseudotsuga menziesii is a Douglas Fir.

It was on a lazy and warm summer afternoon in 2001 when I felt bored. I tried something. I cut a couple of Rosa ‘Reine Victoria’,a lovely Bourbon Rose, and placed it over my scanner. I suspended the rose with a little bamboo stick so that the rose would not squash on the glass. It seems I was lucky. Since then I have compiled at the very least 3000 scans of our roses, other plants, hosta leaves and hosta flowers.

Rosa 'Reine Victoria' - scan summer of 2001

From the beginning I had a goal. This was to scan the rose at 100% size, included the exact date and I was most careful in being accurate with colour. I thought that botanical organizations in other countries would have been interested in comparing notes. They were not. I have a few very large prints of my plants in my living room. People who visit say, “I like your photographs of flowers.” The moment I correct then that, “They are not photographs. They are scanographs and I am a scanographer.” They then lose interest and turn around.

My aversion to taking pictures of “flowers” began in the early 90s when my Rosemary forced me to go to a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society. Once we were there I told her, “Why have you brought me to this place with uncomfortably hard chairs and we are subjected to looking at over 100 bad projected slides of roses?"

Taking a photograph with a macro lens of a rose in situ to me does not show that accuracy of the scanned rose or show a respect for the plant. When I place my rose on my flatbed scanner I work around with the leaves to show the rose at its accurate best.

I must admit now that sometimes I forget that accuracy and I get artsy. Of late I have found tremendous pleasure in showing roses that are past their perfection. There is beauty in wilting death.

Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' and Rosa foetida 'Austrian Copper' 21 June 2025

1977 - Mamiya RB-67 & 65mm lens

There are some advantages of bed rotting with my two cats. Today I again scanned a bunch of red roses (because they were there). While in bed I wondered what excuse I could use the red roses  I has scanned to write some sort of blog. Then I remembered.

In my nightie I ran to my oficina and went into my 4 drawer filing cabinet (perhaps around 600 women in alphabetical order). I went straight to the “Model in Red”.

In 1977 I was trying to become a photographer in Vancouver. I told Rosemary, “I cannot compete with my Pentaxes with photographers who use Hasselblads. I cannot afford to buy one.” I thought hard and ordered a Mamiya RB67 from Adorama in New York City. For this 6x7 camera I bought a 65mm wide angle (equivalent to a 35mm in 35 mm cameras) because I could not afford to buy another lens.

I took the camera to sssssss and showed it to art director Rick Staehling.He told me that my camera looked like one on steroids. A month later he called me to tell me he had an assignment and wanted me to use the new camera.

We quickly found out that on the horizontal format (the Mamiya has a revolving film back) the photograph fit a two-page spread to perfection. On a vertical format the photograph fit a full-page bleed vertical page.

It seems that for a while all those photographers with expensive Hasselblads could not compete with my Mamiya.

This was  when we were living in Burnaby. I have no memory of the name of the model in red and how she found me.  The resulting photographs, six with the Mamiya and two rolls with my Asahi Pentax S-3 are  really the first ever photographs I ever took of a model. Obviously I had no idea of what I was doing.

It is nice to use here my new obsessive scanner negative sandwiches without  mayonnaise.

I wonder what might have happened to her. And I cannot believe that I have these photographs nicely filed. My 20-year-old Photoshop 8 handled correcting the colour shift with no problem.