Taken with my Rolleiflex 2.8F on Ilford HP5+ film during a long photowalk with RJR through East Van and North Burnaby in 2018, or 2019. I am considering these photographs for inclusion in my current project, a 15 year retrospective.
Nikon EM – The Story of a Camera /
My father’s Nikon EM mounted with a 35 mm f/2.5 E Series lens. Not clearly visible in this photograph is the fact that the rewind crank is missing.
This is not a review. This is the story of a camera. Not of a camera make and model, but of a particular camera in the world, a camera that made its way by route and hands unknown from Japan to sub-Saharan Aftica, a camera that found itself amidst the history of a country in turmoil, a camera that touched the life of my family. This is a story of life after death. And it’s an unfinished story that I intend to keep telling for the rest of my days.
Retrospective/We are the stories we tell ourselves of who we are /
From 2009-2012, or thereabouts, I carried a Rolleiflex TLR camera with me wherever I went. Almost invariably it was loaded with black-and-white film, which I developed in my bathroom at home. Today I began the process of re-examining the archive of my negatives with the goal of producing a photobook that seeks to make thematic sense of my relationship to photography over the last 15 years. (The four photographs shown above were taken in London, Toronto, and Victoria in late 2009.)
Here is my current selection of photographs for this project.
Here are brief descriptions of my current projects and a list of abandoned/defunct projects.
Denyse Thomasos at the Vancouver Art Gallery /
“Process is an insistence of structure.”
Virtual Incarceration (1999). Acrylic on canvas.
Metropolis (2007). Acrylic, charcoal and porous-point marker on canvas.
Excavations: Courtyards in Surveillance (2007). Acrylic on canvas.
A wonderful afternoon with Sofia at the Vancouver Art Gallery after a delicious dad-and-daughter brunch at Sophie’s Cosmic Café on the first day of spring break. The works of the Trinidadian-Canadian painter Denyse Thomasos provoked strong positive reactions and much animated conversation. (The full-scale images and details of the three paintings shown above were made on my iPhone. These photographs do not do the works justice. They are enormous and must be experienced in person.)
