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In this century there is this urge to catalogue and define everything.

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I have an artist friend who talks about the categories in art such as sculpture, painting, etching, but never mentions the Vancouver craze for installation art.

Of me he includes in his category of you guys (photographers). I feel slightly offended. It is as if we are Martians or not quite human.

My problem with all that began when I was a little boy and my mother was going to give me a whipping because I had misbehaved. My grandmother would come to the rescue and say, “Nena you have to be patient with Alex because he is an artist like me.”

As a magazine photographer in Vancouver beginning in the late 70s I quickly understood that to call oneself an artist would result in a quick bitterness as few photographers were seen to be artists.

It was my friendship with Argentine painter Juan Manuel Sánchez in the late 90s when he said I was an artist that I began to accept that I could be an artist. I have never paraded this fact, as it is very difficult to be accepted as one in our Vancouver that so loves conceptual and installation art.

But going back to my artist friend I do see an important difference between him and “us guys”. He paints and sells. I wonder all the time how artists who sell survive the loss of their creation.

We guys keep our negatives, slides or our digital files. We might exhibit photographs and write below “One of 10” but we know we have that negative in our files.

I have never felt that loss except when I am looking for a particular image and I have either misfiled it or lost it altogether.