About FACES

The reason you are reading this is still a little hard for me to fathom. I've taken pictures all my life, and after I realized I could never buy enough shoes to furnish the boxes for an exponentially expanding slide collection - and had run out of friends who were willing to view them - I switched to negative film and prints, and more viewer-friendly albums. I then spent any spare cash (and some that wasn't strictly spare) on mounting my better products on walls at home and at work, while avoiding answering my wife's enquiries about how and when we would be able to match them up with an affordable house with adequate wall space. Then everything changed. Since first logging-on, I've been excited and continually amazed by what the internet has done for photography, and what I know it will still accomplish; a far cry from screens, albums, frames, galleries and coffee-table books, although all those are still very relevant.

I never really expected, though, to be anything other than a cyberspace admirer of other people’s artistry. That changed when I was given a rather rudimentary internet site for Christmas more than twenty years ago. While at first striking me as pretentious in the extreme and an insufferable vanity on the part of a very amateur photographer, I suppressed these well-founded scruples and warmed to the concept, first as a way of sharing experiences and perspectives with far flung family and friends, but also, perhaps, as a vehicle for exchanging views and ideas with a wider audience, as I struggled to become a better photographer. Thus, your views and suggestions are welcome indeed.

My friends and netiquette mentors tell me I should say a word about who I am and what perspective I seek to bring to these pictures, so here goes:

I was raised in Montreal with two brothers and two sisters. My wife and I have been married for nearly half a century and we have four daughters and seven grandchildren. We both had careers in the Canadian Public Service, and each of us travelled a great deal both professionally and because we enjoy it. Our children have inherited our fascination with peoples, cultures and environments, and our grandchildren seem to have caught the same bug. Since a teenager, photography has been a passion and my subject has - to the exclusion of most else - been people; mostly, faces. Through my lenses I've sought to explore who we are, where and how we live; what unites and divides us, and to celebrate the unyielding human spirit. 

Over much of what for me was an exciting and fulfilling 39-year career, I was engaged with the challenge of building bridges across the ever-widening gulf between the fortunate few and the increasingly desperate many. My travels and assignments took me to most parts of the world; very much including some of our time's most appalling circumstances. That said, I've not sought to chronicle the immediate horror of such situations. There are far better and braver photojournalists than I could ever be to accomplish this vitally important task. 

Whether, though, it was in the midst of the genocide in Rwanda, the ravages of the Angolan civil war, the murderous inter-communal struggles in Darfur, the predations of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Northern Uganda, the marauding and pitiless jihadis throughout the Sahel, the continuing slaughter in the Eastern DRC, or the never-ending struggles in the Middle East, it was clear to me that individual dignity does prevail, and the human spirit is indeed indomitable. Throughout most of our world, and so very particularly in Africa, pervasive and grinding poverty exacerbates these desperate struggles, as we in the West enjoy a time of unprecedented plenty. That too is what I've tried to capture in these images.

R R F
Ottawa, April, 2023