Rosa 'Sombreuil' 13 August 2026

The Rose Family – Robert Frost – 1928

The rose is a rose,

And was always a rose.

But the theory now goes

That the apple's a rose,

And the pear is, and so's

The plum, I suppose.

The dear only knows

What will next prove a rose.

You, of course, are a rose -

But were always a rose.

When I found this poem I immediately thought of my Rosemary since she was the one who in 1991 gently pushed me to go to a Vancouver Rose Society meeting at the Van Dusen Garden Flora Hall. I could now not live with roses in my little Kits garden. Her name, to my ears, sounds even more beautiful – Rosamaría.

The name Rosemary comes from the Latin phrase rosmarinus, meaning "dew of the sea" (ros meaning "dew" and marinus meaning "of the sea"). In English, folk etymology later reshaped the sound of the word to blend with the unrelated personal names Rose and Mary.

The white rose here is Rosa ‘Sombreuil’. It has a lovely scent, blooms for months and is a climber.

Rosa ‘Sombreuil’ -1850 by the breeder Français-André Robert. However, there is a modern controversy: the popular large-flowered climbing rose widely sold as 'Sombreuil' in the United States today is a different modern or 20th-century climber introduced around 1951 by Roses of Yesterday and Today.

The terms analog photograpy or capturing a photograph are not in my vocabulary. There seems to be a renaissance in analog (using film with film cameras) photography now but I believe it is only limited to black and white.

My longtime friend Jeff Gin who is the manager of the Lonsdale Kerrisdale Cameras tells me that young (mostly male) under 30 chaps show up at his store for and want their film processed. They ask for 3x4 inch prints. When they come to pick them up Jeff asks them if they want the negatives. They don’t.

I started printing colour negatives and slides around 1979 in my Burnaby darkroom. One day my Rosemary told me, “You have been complaining about your inability to print colour. I have signed you up for tomorrow Monday for a course on the subject at Ampro Photo Workshops.

She helped me improve my career as I could print for magazines overnight when there was a rush for the magazine to go to print the next day.

And most important using the magenta, yellow, red, blue, cyan and green Kodak Color Print Viewing Filter Kit taught me to understand and correct the photographs that I take in colour with my digital camera,

But I must pleasantly add that in Vancouver now I can purchase colour negative film and Kodak Ektachrome in both the 35mm format and 120. Our local The Lab will process it overnight.

To illustrate this blog I have scanned stuff that I have that I find difficult to trash. If I throw it all away it would seem like I am getting rid of an important part of my life.

In the box of  the Veracruz thin cigars I used to smoke I kept my Spotone kit. With these inks and the brushes we would spot (remove white dust spots) from our photographs. Sometimes I had to scrape stuff from the photos and that is why the razor blade is there.

The 3 Kodak manuals were my manuals for many years. They have information on colour temperature, depth of field and lots more. Lastly the blondish woman was called Sherley. We used the negative to calibrate our colour enlargers. Shirley famously was a problem for the very good photographer that Oscar Peterson was. His subjects were black so Shirley was not help. I believe that the term "the colour purple" came from the problem of printing negatives of black people. For years Kodak marketed film made in India that rendered darker complexions better. Some photographers used that film to add a built-in fake sun tan.

Now with my excellent Epson V700 scanner and my Epson P700 colour printer my inkjets are superior to anything I might have done in that last century. They are properly colour balanced thanks to my Rosemary.

I wonder if the analog photography guys will ever warm up to colour?

Sketch by Eduardo Bettencourt

Photographs - Ed Gifford

I like to use the expression above because as a portrait photographer I am almost always behind my camera. I am rarely photographed. My fried, photographer Ed Gifford took my portrait in July and he made also an artistic version of it.

Photograph - Storme Morrison

Storme Morrison took my portrait with my Asahi Pentax S-3 loaded with extremely sharp Kodak Technical Pan (lots in my fridge since the film was discontinued in 2005).

Last year my first purchased camera, 1959 in Austin, Texas, a Pentacon-F stopped working. My friend Gary Cullen made a new shutter for it as he has the black cloth of the shutter. My friend Curtis Daily who lives in Portland, was visiting and said we should test it He took my portrait with Pancho and the camera was loaded with Kodak Ektachrome which is still sold in Vancouver not only in 35 mm but in the 120 medium format. Our local The Lab processed it overnight. They are the only ones who do Ektachrome in all of Canada.

Photograph by Curtis Daily

The drawings were done by my Angola-born friend Eduardo Bettencourt yesterday at our Sylvia Hotel tertulia. He speaks many languages including Spanish. He is a published poet.

Taken by my Welsh Neighbour Ian Galsworthy on my birthday last year.

Rosa 'Gabriel Oak' - 12 August 2026

 

All I could find out about the expression “on the fritz” is that it appeared in use in the US in 1902.

This morning when I turned on my Windows 10 computer to my shock the image on my screen (an early photograph of Rosemary and me) had shifted five inches to the left. The power off button was one of the many things I could not see. I had to turn off the computer at the computer itself.

Thankfully the Chris at EJ Cell PHone Repair, a mere three blocks from my house, repaired it in under three minutes. But fritz kept at it. When I connected all the wires there was nothing on my monitor screen. I called Chris who told me to check on the graphics connection and make sure it was at the bottom and not on the top. Success!

I depend on my computer for three very important actions of my day. I scan my plants, negatives, photographs, and write my blog.

Besides those three activities I feed my cat Niña; feed myself, make my bed, ride my bike and shop at Safeway. All I can say is that is a perfectly monotonous, but pleasant daily routine. I do a lot of thinking. I think about death and I think all the time of my Rosemary.

I have written before how On Language columnist of the NY Times, William Safire told me (I Interviewed him in Seattle) of the concept he called “resistentialism”. He defined it as inanimate objects proving to humans that they too have free will.

Once my system was in good working order I was able to scan my Rosa ‘Gabriel Oak’. If I were 35 years old and needed the money I think I could sell my scanograph prints for good money in local hotels and abroad.

It is just fun to scan. It is part of my routine until fritz intervenes again.

Lisa Milroy

I have been writing Ad infintum about my terrific newish 28-inch wide Acer monitor. I am able to see all the little pictures in my photo files displayed on the large screen. I have noticed gems I had missed. At the same time I am fixing many of them by making them darker and removing little white dust spots I may have missed before. Why am I doing this? When I die all my cameras will be in working order and my two ancient Norman 200B flashes will be just fine. Perhaps I am fixing my files for some sort of posterity.

Today I reached Lisa Milroy’s photographs. I wrote about her here Lisa Milroy.

These photographs seen again show what an unusual beautiful woman she is while at the same time expressing lots of intelligence. Three of the portraits, the grainy ones I took with Kodak Black and White Infrared film. To use it one must attach a deep red filter in front of the lens. While the results show a glowing skin anything that is red shows very light. I believe the Milroy must have had a blue or purple based lipstick.

Because I still use this discontinued film (lots in the fridge) every time I go to London Drugs to buy purple lipstick I am stared at.

I was extremely disturbed when I went to my files (I have one on just women) and I could not find Milroy, Lisa or Lisa Milroy. Then I thought hard and went to my other files and in the M-Files there she was! I shot two rolls of 100ISO film and one of the infrared. I am sure that there are many more gems.

Milroy lives in London and she is an artist and a teacher.

Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' 10 August 2026

 

Peter Trower

With rue my heart is laden

For golden friends I had,

For many a rose-lipt maiden

And many a lightfoot lad.

 By brooks too broad for leaping

 The lightfoot boys are laid;

 The rose-lipt girls are sleeping

 In fields where roses fade.

A.E. Houseman from LIV A Shropshire Lad

Many of my roses have the faces of people. This English Rose, Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’ has the face of my poet friend Peter Trower, now gone, who was often called the logging poet.

WeMany of us used to meet every Thursday at noon at the Railway Club in the 80s and early 90s. We were a group of photographers, artists, editors, musicians, strippers and, yes, poets like Trower, and Jamie Reid. It was Trower who recommended I read A Shropshire Lad. I did.

This English rose is one of my best. Today it is the only rose in my garden in bloom. One of its most lovely characteristic is the new growth is a deep and dark red.

I miss those two poets as I do Gerry Gilbert and Susan Musgrave who now lives in Masset. My other friend Michael Turner I cannot find a contact number for him. The only poets I have left are the ones I read in books.

Portia Winters - & left Colleen Hughes

In that perfect world there were essences.

I have modified my Platonism because of women and cats. My Portland bassist friend Curtis Daily once told me that all cats have in their genes a memory of having been petted by Egyptian pharaohs. My Rosemary and I when one of our cats would die (we had many beginning in 1977, we would immediately adopt a middle-aged cat from the SPCA. We enjoyed the mutual adaptation. We also discovered that somehow the new cat had something of the old cat. I identified that as the essence of being a cat.

Since I began taking photographs of women in Mexico City beginning in 1967 with portraits of my Rosemary and nudes of her in 1969 I have photographed thousands of women.

Here are two that stand out in my mind (besides my Rosemary) of being extremely sure of themselves. The woman on the left, Portia Winters was an ecdysiast that I photographed for a Vancouver business magazine called Equity. The article was called Sex Sells and it was all about the business side of the profession. I took photographs of Winters in the Number 5 Orange dressing room. I may have been one of the few men in Vancouver allowed to take photographs in them. With camera in hand I followed Winters’s routines. I seemed to be invisible to her. In this photograph of her I see a woman sure of herself. She knows who she is and what she is.

The second woman, Colleen Hughes, is a friend who lives in Edmonton. I once photographed her with her baby boy in my tub. The photograph was the back cover of Reader’s Digest. I took many photographs of her including some in Lighthouse Park. Others I took in her house when she was living in Vancouver. This photograph is another example of a woman who has that perfect essence of being a woman.

I would only add that she is the essence of a film noir woman.

My oficina - 9 August 2026

This is what I face when I enter my oficina to scan or to write. The first thing I see on my marvellous new Acer monitor is this photograph of Rosemary and me taken by my Yorkshire-born compadre (godfather of my youngest daughter Hilary) with my Asahi Pentax S-3 at the botanical garden of the University of Mexico in 1968. It is really my favourite photograph of the both of us as the memories behind it fill my heart with joy and melancholy now that she is gone.

Something amazing is that I have the original Kodak colour negatives and they are in good shape. Better still the small drugstore photographs printed all those years ago have not faded.

This new (ish sold to me by my friends of EJ Phone Repair for $140) monitor puts a smile into my face ( until recently that did not happen often). I can see my many photo files with all the little pictures across the screen. Thanks to it I have found many gems that I overlooked with my old Dell CRT monitor.

On the right of this photograph that I took with my Fuji X-E3 there are two cameras. The one in back is the Asahi Pentax S-3 that I bought used at Foto Rudiger on Avenida Venustiano Carranza in Mexico City in 1962. It has become my Sword Excalibur and I am using it a lot with two films. One is Ilford 100 ISO b+w and the other is the long discontinued (many rolls in my fridge) of Kodak Technical Pan which I rate at 50 ISO and is nicely processed in our excellent The Lab.

The other camera is an Exakta VX given to me by a friend Gary Cullen. He said I should have one. I am not sure he is right but then he owns a 1947 Tatra which I believe is the most beautiful car ever made. The Exakta is for left handed people and everything about its design makes it impossible that I will ever understand how to use it. But it has a special memory for me as a similar Exakta, a VXIIA was the camera that Jimmy Stewart used in my most favourite film (after Laura with Gene Tierney) Hitchcock’s Rear Window  with the incomparable Grace Kelly. And below my portrait of the film’s villain, Raymond Burr, in a nice accidental double exposure.

That Wondrous Tatra

Helianthus annuus - 9 August 2026

For me there is a beauty in family traditions. One of them is that every year my daughter Alexandra who lives in Lillooet brings me some of her sunflowers. This year I kept her gift in the pot and did not plant it in the back lane which was part of the tradition. I cut these two spent flowers to scan them. There are many buds in the rest of the plant so more rewards are in store.

It was many years ago that my grandmother and I went to a show in Mexico City of a young Filipino painter. We stood in front of a Mexican huarache and my abuelita told the painter, “That is ugly.” The painter retorted, “Ah, the beauty of ugliness.” I have never forgotten. I have loved ever since the imperfect. This scan of Helianthus annuus is beautiful just like that huarache.

I like the Spanish word for sunflower – girasol. Girar is to turn. So the Spanish word suggests that the flower moves to always face the sun. Julio Cortázar in his great work Rayuela (Hopscotch) write in the beginning about his protagonist Horacio Oliveira who evokes the smile or the way his Lucía (his love interest) in this way:

“Quiero decir que abría el girasol de su boca.”

“I want to say she opened the sunflower of her mouth

Alexandra , Lloyd and My Rosemary in Lillooet

Cachivaches - 8  August 2026

 

¿Por qué librarse de lo que se amontona, como en todas las casas, en el fondo de los cajones? (...) Además, lo que obviamente no sirve siempre me ha interesado mucho. Me gusta de una manera cariñosa lo inacabado, lo mal hecho, aquello que torpemente intenta un pequeño vuelo y cae sin gracia al suelo. Clarice Lispector

Why get rid of stuff that piles up in all homes, in the bottom of drawers?  Besides what obviously is not useful always has peaked m y interest. I like in an affectionate way what is unfinished, badly made, that which uncomfortably attempts a short flight and falls graceless on the floor. My translation

Cachivache se refiere a un objeto roto, viejo o de poco valor. En la obra de Julio Cortázar, este término y concepto reflejan su fascinación por lo cotidiano, lo imperfecto y los pequeños detalles marginales de la vida. Julio Cortázar

The Spanish word "cachivache" refers to an object that is broken or is of little value. In Cortázar’s works, this term and concept reflect his fascination for the everyday stuff, the imperfect and the little marginal details of life. My translation.

My house is full of cachivaches. Many are from my family when I was a little boy but most of it is stuff that Rosemary and Purchased in Mexico like pottery, etc. Perhaps all my cameras are cachivaches that will be worthless to anybody else when I will become one less cachivache in my house as soon as I meet up with my oblivion.

In my scan of some of my wortless objects there is a lovely, very heavy Mexican ashtray, a fake Rollex I purchased I a trip to Hawaii, an Italian switchblade given to me by a communist aunt in 1967 in Buenos Aires, a toy frog that croaks because it has a battery operation, a large cigarette lighter and a wooden box my mother used to store her rings and small jewelry.

I find that with having less and less to do every day that my only respite from bed rottting wit my cat Niña is to write more than one daily blog.

8 August 2026

2.Top right - Hosta 'El Niño'

3. Bottom left - Hydrangea macrophylla 'Ayesha'

4. Middle(one bloom) Gentiana asclepiadea

5. Little flower right Aquilegia caerulea 'Deep Blue & White'

6. Bottom right Eryngium planum 'Blue Glitter'

The Arabs that settled in Spain around 711 AD left a lovely etimological imprint in the Spanish language. Such is the case of – azúl (blue)

Su origen etimológico proviene del árabe clásico lāzawárd, y este a su vez del persa lažvard o laǧvard, vinculado con el nombre de la piedra lapislázuli. RAE

The excellent dictionary of the Spanish language RAE has this on blue, my translation:

Azúl comes from, the classic Arab word lāzawárd and that word originates from the Persian and from there to lažvard o laǧvard whichis close to the Arabic word for lapis lazuli.

The Ukranian/Brazilian author (now dead) Clarice Lispector has this lovely opinion on what blue is:

Para ver el azul miramos el cielo. La tierra es azul para quien la mira desde el cielo. ¿Azul será un color en sí, o una cuestión de distancia? ¿O una cuestión de gran nostalgia? Lo inalcanzable es siempre azul.

To see blue we look at the sky. Our earth is blue for those who see it from the skey. Blue must be what it is or is it a question of distance?  Or is it a question of a great nostalgia? That which cannot be reaches is blue. My translation.

My Rosemary’s favourite colour was blue. I associate blue with cool and that she was. She was elegant in how she dressed but quite warm in our relationship.

That meant we had lots of plants with blue flowers. She tolerated my large collection of hostas and did like my blue ones.

In these two recent scans you can see the blue in my garden yesterday and today.

The more I scan (a relaxing endeavour) the more I don’t understand why more of the people I know in Vancouver don’t do the same.

Hosta 'Rainbow's End' - 7August 2026

Rosenary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward - 1969

La muerte me ha golpeado en lo que más amaba, y no he sido capaz de levantarme y devolverle el golpe con el mero acto de volver a vivir.

~ Julio Cortázar

Death has struck me it that which I loved the most, and I have not been capable of picking myself up and return that strike with the mere act of returning to live. My translation

This is my 7000^th blog and some sort of a milestone. I knew days ago that I had to write something a bit out of the ordinary. But all thoughts ended up in knowing I had to write about my loss of Rosemary. She did die on 9 December 2020, but as days pass, it seems that for me my feelings of loss are worse today.

It may have to do with the fact that I am living alone with a female cat surrounded by tactile memories of her. Niña was her cat and her hands stroked her often.

What makes my situation worse is, that with no prospect of work, (and no need for it ,as there is plenty of money in the bank) I live a life in which I feel that my utility to my world is gone. I can really state that what keeps me alive is the knowledge that should I die before Niña, there would be nobody to take care of her.

There is a special fate that few that I know understand. This is that my home is filled with framed portraits of Rosemary on the walls and when I look at them, she is looking back at me as I always wanted eye contact with my subjects and family. She is staring at me with her sad eyes. I know that in our 52 year marriage she gave me stability, attention and love.

I no longer miss the sex. I miss those quiet moments in bed when I could hear her breathing. Come morning, our breakfasts in bed (25 years of them) were the best moments of our lives.

I will soon meet my oblivion, and once there, I will have no feelings or memories for her. Death may have one advantage in the end.

CP Train Station - 7 August 2026

 

Because I am a product of the last century and a photographer from it I have always considered that the Holy Grail of photography is a personal style that can be identified. That last century was of the Irving Penns, Richard Avedons, Philippe Halsmans and only Annie Leibovitz is a survivor.

7 August 2026

The flavour of the month and of many years leading up to this one has been street photography. Because Henri Cartier-Bresson was a pioneer who lived many years in Paris and went to cafés his b+w photographs are instantly recognizable. Of late Vivien Meirs is in ascendance. For people under 30 Dorothea Lange may be an unknown.

7 August 2026

Street photography is the norm because most people now carry that ubiquitous camera that is the cellular phone. I think there is another reason. Post covid pandemic has made people less willing to talk face to face or answer the phone. It is far safer to press the button on you cell phone camera from across the street or to make believe you are looking at it when you press take.

I have always been a portrait photographer and part of the pleasure in being one is to address the person you are going to photograph. But you cannot be a “one trick pony” so I shoot street photographs in Mexico and Argentina (landscapes there, too) but try not to shoot sunsets. I scan my plants, which while it is not photography is it a form of making images.

Because I print lots I had to go to Opus downtown to buy 81/2 by 11 inch plastic sleeves for my prints. Opus on Granville Island had run out.

I decided to take my Fuji X-E3 camera. I took 3 photographs. One of them was for a purpose.

It was when I was a little boy that my grandmother told me that at around 1918 she and her two daughters and son travelled to the Bronx from Manila. I remember how she told me (in Spanish), “We disembarked from our Japanese boat in a place that had mountains and forests. It was called Vancooover.” We went to a large train station and from there we took a train to Montreal and from there to NY City.

In my recent past when I happened to be downtown (I avoid it now) I liked to to the CP Train Station and sit on a bench (most gone now) and imagine my family walking across it.

The panoramic was a shock for me as that cruise liner is huge. It is almost like a floating first class hotel.

The third shot when I saw it I had to go around the block. Am I a street photographer?

No.