November 1988 - 4 December 2022

 To be on my own, with no direction home

My current mantra to keep my excitement in photography at my age of 80 is Garry Winogrand. He wrote:

“I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.”

Illustrating this blog is an image I took for the Dec/January 1998/199 Saturday Night.

At that time we photographers had to have the latest technology. This was the fax machine and the pager. 

For most of my career as a magazine photographer in Vancouver (1978 until magazines began to disappear a few years ago) I was pushed, nagged, and inspired by art directors (sometimes called design directors). In the case of Vancouver Magazine that also included editor Malcolm Parry. Both Rick Staehling and Chris Dahl made me take photographs that exceeded my imagination or comfort zone.

In fact it was Staehling who happily made me understand how important it was to be humble when he assigned me to photograph sewing machines.

With a little help from my friends

My Rosemary, was also brutal, sometimes, in her opinion when I would show her some of my photographs which until that moment I thought were good. Thanks to those people I never rested in my laurels and kept at it to produce stuff that at the very least would excite me.

As evidence of that former pushing I have here the two-page fax from Saturday Night art director Barbara Solowan. I have paired it with a photograph I took of an Argentine friend on 4 December 2022.

While my Rosemary is not here now to give me her opinion on that image I believe it isn’t all that bad.