Guanajuato, Guanajuato, Mexico 1962

My photographic life in 1962 in Mexico was simple. All I had to do was to pick up my Pentacon-F, load it with Kodak Tri-X and go out into the street to take whatever caught my eye. Sometimes with my friend Robert Hijar we would go on trips to Guanajuato, Mexico where I shot the pictures you see here.

I had no idea then that someday I would become a photographer in a place I had no idea existed then, Vancouver.

It was perhaps in these street photographs that I began to learn composition.

I look at these now and I feel like more than 64 years have gone by. Was it almost a lifetime? I had yet to meet Rosemary or do my military service in Buenos Aires. I was barely a young man as I was 20.

Looking at these photographs I can smell that fine scent that is dry dirt under a hot sun.

In the years that I have returned to Guanajuato (at least 8 times and once with not  only Rosemary but with our granddaughter Rebecca) I have passed by this city well and wondered what might have happened to that young girl. Her photograph plays a trick on her true size. She was tiny. And yet she almost looks like the grown woman she would one day be.