16 May 2026

When possible even when I feel lazy I go out in my bike (it has only 3 speeds) and go to Jericho Beach. There is a park on Point Grey Road where I stop to take a photograph with my Fuji X-E3. When I did so this day I had two thoughts. The first one is that somehow by underexposing my shot one stop the sky looks like it has been polarized by having a polarizing filter. I used to use these filters a lot with film but never with a digital camera.

That other thought is, of course, of my Rosemary who brought us from Mexico City in 1975. In a few years, thanks to her forward vision I became an established photographer and by the 90s I was emulating my journalist father.

The view of our skyline is far enough that one could almost (not quite) believe it was that friendly 1975 Vancouver. 

 

Easter - Burnaby 1977

 Julian Barnes - Death & the Lemon Table

I have something of those Canadian Monarch Butterflies and birds that fly south. They guide themselves by locations on the way in their memory. Like those butterflies and birds wherever I drive in Vancouver I remember, “I went with Rosemary here.” It is an inescapable thought somehow connected to the Julian Barnes concept of IAM which stands for Involuntary Autobiographical Memory. These memories will not stop.

What that means is that I am constantly thanking Rosemary for her vision and I do not take for granted that I live in a pretty stable part of the world.

I look at the photograph I took of my family in our home in Burnaby at Easter 1977 and I almost smile. It is a moment that will never come back although Jorge Luís Borges had something to say about first times. He said that those exact first times are repeated in our memory ad infinitum. I can only add that few of us (or at least this guy) never did think when I was taking such photographs that I would be looking back at that moment. We anticipate a future of activities but never the future of looking back at a past.