Rear View Window, 563 E. Hastings St., Vancouver, 1983

“You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved.” ― Ansel Adams

I reject the term “capture” used in relation to photography. I feel the same way, though perhaps not so strongly, about “taking” a photo.

The latter has historically been synonymous with the act of pressing a camera’s shutter release; the former is the new (digital?) version of photographic marksmanship (I’m not that fond of the term “shoot” either).

These terms are imprecise, even misrepresentations of what we photographers do. We do not “take” anything, as Ansel Adams reminded many years ago; “we make it.”

Photographs are not there for the taking, and we certainly can’t “capture” a moment any more than we can actually “harness” energy. In both cases, we simply borrow or redirect — in photography, lightwaves through a prism. However practiced our aim, I mean intention (and I’ve dedicated my life to developing this craft), we can not (at this writing) arrest or travel through time.

The photograph above was the result of one of the first outings, in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, with my antique Mamiyaflex medium-format camera. I remember pulling the first print (on single-weight fibre paper), convinced this was one of the best photographs I’d produced. Thirty-seven-years later I hold on to the conviction, despite little external accord.

The store, with its display of what were, even then, obsolete appliances, reflected a spectrum of ideas I’d been pondering, especially following my recent “years in the wilderness.” If Adams’ assertion about the provenance of good photographs holds, then those of André Kertész, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Walker Evans, and Eugène Atget; Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock; Brian Eno and David Byrne’s “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” (most often loaded in my Walkman then), mixed with my family’s love of irony, had prepared me to see in this window a reflection of the fleeting attraction of convenience and the promises of technology.

Photographs are not paintings and photography is not taxidermy.

So please don’t take offence if I don’t accept as compliments “It looks like a painting!” or “Nice capture!”