Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' 16 November 2025

 

When we arrived in Vancouver from Mexico City in 1975 I remember the futility of trying to find a job as a photographer. I remember facing a man in the London Drugs photography department and being asked by him what I was. I told him, “I am a portraitist.” He looked at me with disdain and said, “I went to McGill in Montreal and I don’t call myself that!” For two years I washed cars at Tilden-Rent-a-Car on Alberni Street.

Once I received my first job as a photographer at the CBC and then with Vancouver Magazine I had the reputation of being a portrait photographer (not a portraitist!). And yet I have done street photography in Mexico, Europe, Argentina; landscape photography in the US, Mexico and Argentina; and finally photographed many women sans clothing. I believe I am not a one-trick-pony.

After over 4000 of my plant scans I am wondering if now I am that pony. I tell incredulous people that my plants and especially my roses talk to me and pressure me to cut them and scan them. I can also assert that I see my plant scans as portraits.

Having been exposed to the philosophy of Plato in 1962 I am a believer in his theory of perfect essences mirrored imperfectly by the world of the senses we live in.

For me a portrait is a gazing into a person’s soul. My rose scans are no different.

Today was a dark, rainy Sunday and went I went to my back lane garden Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’ did say to me, “Alex I am not through yet. Cut me and take my portrait.”