It was in August of 2013 that my Rosemary told me, “Alex you cannot keep bribing the folks at the Buenos Aires and Mexico City airports not to X-Ray your     film. Get a digital camera now!” I obeyed her and went to Leo’s on Granville and Jeff Gin sold me a Fuji X-E. A few years later I bought an X-E3.

As a photographer the above changed me. I do shoot film both in 35mm and in 120 with my Mamiya RB-67. I define shooting with film with one word – uncertainty. Knowing what you just shot with a digital camera does have its advantages. This is most evident when I use slow shutters to photograph dance.

At my age of 84 I believe I am still fit as I bike for an hour with my 3-speed non electric bicycle. I stop in one place, at the end of Musqueam View Street when it dead ends on Point Grey Road, and take a photograph with my Fuji X-E3 of the  same view of Vancouver and North Vancouver. I purposely underexpose it one or two stops to make the ever present clouds (one of the charms of this city) more dramatic. Sometimes I take wide or extra wide panoramics. This is a feature of my Fuji not found in more expensive Nikons and Canons.

These three panoramics, two taken at the beach on Pacific Blvd are glorious and when I confront these views and I am dazzled, I am instantly thankful of Rosemary who brought us from Mexico City in 1975. She must have known something about the present situation down south. She said, “Alex we cannot go to the US because there you are an alien. We are going to Vancouver.”

What did that smart and beautiful woman see in me? I believe she recognized my future talent in photography before I did.                    

It is impossible to tell anybody (and for them to understand) the grief I experience every day after the death of my Rosemary 6 years ago on December 2020. We were married for 52 years and for me there is no relief in distraction. It amounts to trying to remove the crease from a creased paper.

To compound my grief this past May 12^th my male cat Niño died. Rosemary and I had adopted him and his twin sister 9 years ago at the Vancouver SPCA. They slept with us. Niña was Rosemary's cat and Niño was mine.Rosemary taught Niño to walk around the block without a leash. After she died I continued the tradition. Niña now has adopted all of Niño's idiosyncracies except the walk.

To all the above there is one blessing. Niño’s sister Niña is inseparable from my presence. She regulates my daily routine that provides me with some comforting stability. I wake up around 7 AM and only then will she meow. I go downstairs and feed her and make my breakfast which I place in a tray and bring it up to my bed as I did with Rosemary for 25 years. I read the Vancouver Sun and the NYTimes. After a brief stay in my garden deck, Niña comes in and gets on my bed between my legs. This action keeps me in bed for quite a while.

Around noon Niña wants more food. When I go to my oficina to scan a plant or write a blog she sits on a chair next to me as Niño once did. In the evening around 8 she stares at me as she is ready for her treats. After that she stares at me again. She wants me to take a bath so that I can get back on the bed and she can get close to me. I postpone turning off the lights until 11:30.

The more I share moments with Niña, the more I suspect she has human qualities and understands death and may even have a memory of the death of my Rosemary and that of Niño.

I do see my youngest daughter Hilary once a week. That is pleasant. But somehow that cannot compete with the constant presence of Niña. I hope she lives a bit longer (she is 16) as it reinforces my will to keep living a tad longer.                                                                                                       

Every day of my present existence is one that I share with my Rosemary who died on 9 December 2026.

I share with birds in knowing when I drive around Vancouver the places where I went with her.  The empty seat in my Cruze is her absent presence. Some might say I am obsessed. Few know what it is to have been married for 52 years to a woman who had multiple interests that we shared. There were even moments when both of us in bed were reading the same author.

The scanned frame picture here is on my dining room credenza. When I sit to have my lunch or dinner she stares at me. I took the photograph in Mexico City in 1969 and it was one of a series that represented the first nude photographs I ever took.

Borges often wrote that every first moment is repeated ad infinitum. A larger version of this photograph is on the wall opposite to my bed. Rosemary stares at me and keeps on after I turn of the lights.

In a Borgesian correction of what he wrote I look at the photograph and I am ready to take it before I took it again. I imagine what I might have said to her.

I never asked her why it was that even when she made a small smile those eyes of her were sad.

I must add that with her portrait in my bedroom she is with me.

Ian Davidson

 

Because I am a Platonist, a fan and believer of Plato’s philosophy, I am frequently thinking about perfection and how in our human world what we see is only a shadow of the real essence that was in Plato’s perfect world of ideas.

When I look at some of my family portraits, I think that they are perfect in that I was able to show (hate the word capture) something of my subject’s inner soul.

Because I am a portrait photographer who was at it since 1959 until now (and I am keeping on) I believe I may have and inside knowledge of what makes a perfect portrait.

I noticed this portrait of architect Ian Davidson, now dead, posing with his Yves Klein Blue sculpture. I looked at it for a while and I believe everything in it is perfect in the sense that you cannot take anything out without diminishing (is it possible to diminish perfection?) its perfection.

I was feeling a real high. “Alex you were really good!” Then I was hit by  some problems. The image you see here is from a past blog, this one, so its size is not all that good. I went into my files and I could not find Davidson, Ian. Finally I went to my “As” and his pictures were in a section called Architects.

I was happy until I looked into the folder and found I took 40 6x7 cm Ektachromes with different variations of this one. There was a second one that was almost exact except for the little triangle of light on one side of his wrist.

My guess is that Vancouver Magazine art director Rick Staehling looked at all 40 pictures and picked the one would have picked too.

Because this city’s art galleries, including the VAG ignore my existence I will just sigh and imagine this image enlarged huge on a wall. I might just happen when I meet up with my forthcoming oblivion.

Perfection has to wait.

I may have been 8 in Buenos Aires. I made a honda (a slingshot) by cutting the inner tube of a bicycle. I used it on a bird that was in one of our garden’s plum trees. I killed it and I was instantly sorry.

Many years later, in our Kerrisdale garden around 1990, we had squirrels that were eating our bulbs. I went to Three Vets and bought an air gun replica of Clint Eastwood’s Smith & Wesson Model 29 double-action revolver chambered in .44 Magnum. One day as I opened the kitchen door I saw a squirrel. I shot it. It leaped into the air and went down. When I neared it, the squirrel was agonizing. I felt sorry. A few days later someone came into our house and stole my CDs, the sound system and the gun.

In 1957 I was 15 and living in Nueva Rosita, Coahuila, Mexico. I had a friend who had a rifle and one day invited me to hunt beavers in a river. We shot over 50 of them. Only a few months later did I become horrified over my action,

For years until about three years ago I would put slug bait as slugs are a hosta’s biggest enemy. I don’t do that anymore.

My grandmother often told me the story of two aging hunters. One of them tells that other, “Suppose you are charged by a tiger?” He responds, “I would shoot him between the eyes with my .30-06 Springfield rifle.” ‘This is countered by, “What if your rifle misfires?” The answer is, “I would wait for him to get close and I would shoot him with my pistol.” This goes on until the hunter climbs a tree and is pursued by the tiger. He finally said, “Do you want the tiger to eat me? Let him eat me.”

When I leave my deck door open, sometimes flies or bees get in. They somehow go up the stairs and they are in my room. I desperately try to capture them with a glass and take them outside. I don’t always succeed. That happened last night with this little bee. I was heartbroken when I found him dead in my bathroom floor.

It would seem I have some Buddhist tendencies.  

Hydrangea quercifolia 'Snowflake' & Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' 9 October 2026

Rosa sericea subsp. omeiensis f. pteracantha - 9 October 2026

Autumn – Emily Dickinson

The morns are meeker than they were,

The nuts are getting brown;

The berry's cheek is plumper,

The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,

The field a scarlet gown.

Lest I should be old-fashioned,

I'll put a trinket on.

Garden plants have a habit in my garden to surprise me. I had the same pleasant experience in finding stuff about my Rosemary long after we had been married. Nine years ago we went to New York City to see a Michelangelo exhibit at the Met. We arrived at opening time at 10. We left at closing time as Rosemary wanted to see the David Hockney exhibit, one by Renoir and when I asked her if she was interested in mediaeval armour she went crazy using her iPhone on horse armour. How was I to know that she was interested in art? Perhaps because she allowed me to spend money on buying cameras and framing my photographs for shows I should have suspected.

There are two scans here that reaveal how plants always seem to have one over me.

The hydrangea (lovely in Spanish – hortensia) has nice fall colour. That is to be expected. But my A Shropshire Lad rose does not seem to understand that winter is almost upon us. Can pink be an autumn colour?

More surprisingly is this little white rose that has a habit of being the first in my garden on May 1. It is now in bloom?

Emily Dickinson is nicely out of town on this one!