Nick Bantock

For months I have had an Ektachrome 6x7 slide (below) in which I figured out I used my camera to copy a b+w print. I could not place the name of the man. Only yesterday I figured out he is a writer. I went to my writer files and found Nick Bantock. 

This photograph is important for me as a few years before I had run into photographer James La Bounty who told me he was doing something he called conceptual photography. He inspired me and my first conceptual photograph was of writer, anthropologist, etc Robert Bringhurst.

Robert Bringhurst

When I went into Bantock’s files I found the tear sheet (that’s what we called them then) from the Globe and Mail and I noticed with some sort of delight that in not knowing how to deal with my photograph they called it Photo illustration by Alex Waterhouse-Hayward.

This kind of photography, which was called editorial photographer and which made me an editorial photographer is now a dying method in moribund newspapers and magazines in Vancouver.

It was a challenging pleasure to figure out a way of taking a portrait that was “different”.

Jim La Bounty