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| Rebecca |
My first
photograph in 1959 was of a classmate in my Austin, Texas boarding school. As a
boy around 8 I could draw likenesses well. I specialized in comic books that
had cowboys like Gene Autrey and or film posters with Randolph Scott.
In Mexico
City, after I met my Rosemary in 1967 and moved to a little house in 1970 I
began to photograph wealthy Mexican families in their homes with my 35mm Asahi
Pentax S-3. I would then process the film and print the pictures in my
bathroom. Because I was competing with portrait studios I was most popular. I
was making good money. In 1975 Rosemary saw no future for our two little girls
so we moved in our VW Beetle to Vancouver. By the late 70s I was a successful
portrait photographer for magazines and newspapers. When we would travel abroad
and especially Mexico City and Buenos Aires I found myself doing what I never
did in Vancouver. This was to shoot street photographs.
I ask myself
rhetorically, “Am I a one trick pony?”
In this 2026
with magazines and newspapers moribund the portrait photographer is as obsolete
as the journalist, the publicist and the graphic designer. There may be a few
photographers somehow making ends meet in weddings.
The cell
phone has become in this century the equivalent of the 19th century Colt
.45 Peacemaker in the US. It has levelled the playing field.
My
photographer friends show me very sharp and colourful photographs they take in
our city streets. If these photographers all mixed their pictures and put them
on a table I would not know who took which one. This is because unless you were
Cartier-Bresson, Vivien Meiers, William Eggleston, Fred Herzog,Mary Ellen Mark
and even Dennis Hopper it is impossible (my opinion) to have an identifiable
personal style if you shoot street
photographs in Vancouver.
I refuse to criticize
their photographs while at the same time I am aware that this one trick pony is doing
something that is doomed to disappear in an age where face to face
communication is fading.