Because I was born in Buenos Aires and my father was English and my mother a Spaniard from the Philippines I have lived with a confused mixture of nationalities. My approach to women therefore has been split between a Latin one and an Anglo Saxon one.

I lived in Mexico for many years and it was in 1968 that I married my Canadian Rosemary who was a proto feminist. Through those years and now that we have lived in Vancouver since 1975 and vestiges of Latin machismo are all gone.

Like any Latin man I put women up in a pedestal as pure beings who never had nasty thoughts of any kind. Women to me were modified versions of my mother. I admired women from afar and my idea was Estella from Great Expectations. The women of my life until Rosemary were remote, untenable and unapproachable. It didn’t help that in my teen years in Texas in the late 50s I did not know how to dance. I was a nerd.

It was when I discovered the photograph of a sitting model admiring a man’s bum taken by Helmut Newton that I realized that there was not too much difference between women and men.

But it was after taking photographs of a few women who were strong in their ideas did I realize that a man’s imagination for what is deemed erotic has nothing to do with the imagination of a woman. They surpass us!

My photography of women therefore has always been guided by my attempt to collaborate and to listen to my female subjects before I snap my shutter. This has served me well.