My grandmother María de los Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena - 1950 Buenos Aires

 

December 9, 2020 was a fatalistic date in my life. That is when my wife Rosemary with whom I had been married for 52 years died. Six minutes before she died she asked, “Am I dying?” I was unable to respond. In some ways once she died my family of two daughters and two granddaughters somehow fractured.

My eldest granddaughter whom Rosemary and I took around the world I see only twice a year (once at Christmas). She does not answer my phone calls or my texts. The younger sister Lauren I see rarely. I am not a grandfather, but an old man.

My youngest daughter told me she does not read my blog (6959 to date) because she does not want to become addicted to her phone. My other daughter, Alexandra lives in remote Lillooet and I may see her about five times a year.

Last night I did a Powerpoint presentation that was autobiographical on how I got into photography at Cineworks. My youngest daughter, who would have been my only family to attend was very busy at her job and told me that she had no makeup or proper clothing to attend. I had given her money for Euber.

The presentation went well but I was melancholic knowing that today I would be faced with emptiness after the fact. Neither of my daughters called to find out how my presentation had been received.

It is here that I want to point out how close I was to my maternal grandmother. She told me all kinds of advice related to the Don Quijote and Spanish refrains she learned when she was educated in Valencia. The one comment of hers that applies to me at my age of 83 is “un cero a la izquierda”. That translates to “a zero to the left”. I will explain that in this way”

0.1, 00.1, 000.1 are all the same. After that initial zero the rest are not necessary.

In short I feel that I am a cero a la izquierda. With only slight humour I tell people that I will soon compose a country and western song called Obsolete- Redundant-Retired and Inconsequential. With the money I have in the bank, my life insurance and my all-paid Kits home I will be most useful to my family when I am dead.

And so it goes.

Hosta 'Antioch' 3 July 2026

To illustrate this blog I am placing an unusual version of my plant scans. I have at least 3000 of them since I started in 2001. For this one I reversed the scan of the hosta flower and made it a negative.

One of these and perhaps ten more might be seen as art, But 3000 of them? As it is when people praise my plant photographs they lose interest the moment I tell them that they are scanographs and that I am a scanographer.

No gallery in this city gives me the time of day. Perhaps when I meet my oblivion my scans will stand out from those crowds.

A 

Karen Gerbrecht

I tell photographers in this century that they lack the push of pushy art directors and editors from that past century that made me take photographs in a ways I did not want to try  and invariably they were right.

One of them Vancouver Magazine art director Rick Staehling (now gone) spent fortunes buying the best American magazines of the 80s. He would show me a portrait from Esquire and would tell me, “Alex try doing something like it.”

Few now know that the first published photograph was one of the Steinway Building in 1873 that appeared in a long gone New York City newspaper. It was possible because the halftone process (lots of dots) had been invented. That photograph immediately linked photography with the arts and not long after it began a competition between magazines and newspapers to publish very good original work.

Now with journalism moribund the only good photographs that I see are in my daily delivered, hard-copy New York Times.

One of the words often used by art director Staehling and his successor, Chris Dahl was, “Do it differently.” This involved complex lighting and cameras of multiple formats or swivel lens panoramics.

The digital cameras of this century are like the 19^th century Colt .45, the Peacemaker, that put all the people who used them on the same foot.

It was in that last century that I met an extraordinary violinist, Karen Kerbrecht who played the instrument in the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. With her we came up with the idea of avoiding the clichés of a person with their instrument We called our experiment “the anti-violinist”.

Now that I have a wide (28 inches) and fabulous Acer monitor I am able to go to any file and instead of opening I choose browse. I then see all the little pictures in the file across my screen. When I punched in Karen Gerbrecht I found one that somehow had escaped my notice. I shot it with a now long gone Polaroid Instant Negative film. I will perhaps place a couple more.

At a future date I will do another blog which I will title the Anti-Dancer. I worked with Lauri Stallings who left Vancouver and has a dance company in Atlanta.

Rosa 'Susan Williams-Ellis' 30 June 2026

Robert Frost – 1874 - 1963

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

In 1962 I was going to an American college in Mexico City, Mexico City College. One of my classes was presided by a man who had been a friend of poet Robert Frost, and astoundingly he looked like the poet. I was much too ignorant (and stupid) to appreciate his class so I sat in the back and yawned constantly.

It was only after I started writing these blogs in 2006 that I started associating my photographs and plant scans to poets and writers.

Today I saw this bloom of Rosa ‘Susan Williams-Ellis’ (and English Rose). In all my years of scanning roses (I may have at least 4000 plant scans) I was struck that this bloom was perfection. It was perfection even if you note the centre is slightly yellow and there is a tinge of red in one of the petals.

To make this perfection even more of a Platonic essence, when I saw the scan on my new (but used) 28 inch wide Acer monitor, it looked exactly like the rose itself.

I just wish I could return to that unnamed English Literature professor whose name I long forgot and tell him that I have found my way.

Rosa 'Ketchup & Mustard' 30 June 2026

My memory has played strange tricks in my years of existence. As an example when I was born I remember that a photographer with a magnesium flash almost blinded my entrance into this world.

When I was 8 in 1950 in Buenos Aires we had a live-in housekeeper called Mercedes Bazaldúa. One morning my mother told her, “Mercedes ve a la almacén de la esquina y pedí una botella de cátsup.”

Not long after that we were invited for dinner at the home of my Uncle Harry who was my father’s older brother. I watched him put sugar into his mixture of Colman’s Mustard. Since then I always use Coleman’s (also called Keen’s) and I put a bit of sugar.

Uncle Harry had been born in Manchester and he and his parents moved to Buenos Aires in 1901. At the time the custom in my family was that the firstborn male would have the middle name of Waterthouse. When my grandparents and Uncle Harry arrived to Buenos Aires my father found out that his parents had gotten married in Buenos Aires. He immediately told himself that his brother was a bastard and that he, my father George was the true first born. So he started using the name Waterhouse. When I was born he tried to have the name Waterhouse in my name George Alexander. At the time names in a foreign language that could be translated into Spanish, were prohibited to stand in the foreign language. When my father then insisted on Waterhouse, he slipped a coima (a bribe) an told the registrar that my surname was Waterhouse-Hayward.

And yes I eat my French Fries with Catsup.

Hosta 'Sun Mouse' 28 June 2026

Today I wrote a blog about not being jaded and I featured a scan of a hosta flower and another with a rose. The link is below.

Unjaded

I want to pursue the subject as I was struck by the strange surface of a new miniature hosta I bought this year. It is from a series of many with the name of mouse.

I was not too upset about cutting the flower for the scan and not know what it would have looked once opened because there is a second unopened flower.

These plants that people praise for their spectacular leaves should stop and look at litte details like the multi-coloured surface of this one.

Hosta 'Dream Queen' 27 June 2026

Jaded comes from the noun "jade," which originally referred to a worn-out, broken-down horse which was usually a mare. By the late 1500s, this evolved into a verb meaning "to tire out or fatigue," and by the 1630s, the adjective "jaded" was used to describe someone dulled by overexposure or continual indulgence.

Hosta 'Dream Queen' & Rosa 'Susan Williams-Ellis' 27 June 2026

Since 2001 I have scanned thousands of plants and roses from my garden. And yet each scan becomes a view of wonder every time. I can sort of predict what the scan will look like but that’s not enough to justify my excitement when I see the result.

Because my Rosemary was into the details of the garden she taught me to observe what photographers now do with their macro lenses. I don’t need such a device as my vision is still sharp.

For many years I was a member of the American Hosta Society. Its members praised the beauty of the variegated leave and poopooed what they said were  uninspiring flowers. I begged to differ. I see in the tall scapes (hosta term for the stem of the flowers) why hostas and agaves are part of the very large asparagus family. But I see a beauty in the flowers before they open and after. Sometimes the flowers are all white and sometimes they are lilac almost purple.

This last scan of Hosta ‘Dream Queen’ caught my eye because of its brilliant white and its proximity to Rosa ‘Susan Williams-Ellis’. I scanned the hosta flower with and without the rose.

Not being jaded has something to do with being an artist. I now almost admit being one. I cannot stop doing it. That first scan of Rosa ‘Reine Victoria’ in 2001 reminds me that Jorge Luís Borges says that all first times are infinitely repeated. And yes, these scans have that wonder and excitement of that long lost rose that died. Its memory persists.