Autobiographical Snapshots

These are short memoir-essays, describing a particular adventure that happened while traveling. Seeing this planet, encountering its inhabitants – human as well as the flora & fauna of the natural world, has always been a deeply embedded personal goal, one that was reinforced and locked into place following my first trip outside North America.

That occurred in 1970, shortly after the University of Toronto fired me from my position as a research assistant in the Physiology Dept. (Medical Sciences) over the founding of Canada’s first campus gay organization. The trip was my way of turning a negative event into an exciting & positive learning experience. I had just enough money saved up to launch an open-ended adventure that would ignite, for my entire life, the gene of wanderlust. Not only was I a ‘homophile’, but also a ‘hodophile’. Psychologically I came to realize how overtly altrustic and empathetic I am of everything I encounter. So very opposite of the narcissistic culture I was immersed in.

That first trip lasted from early March until the final days of November when I received news of my father’s death and immediately left West Berlin, where I had just received my ‘Aufenhaltserlaubnis’ (residence permit), and found both an apartment and a job. Several of the B&W images on this website were taken with my first camera (a Bronica 6×6 medium format SLR) during this long voyage.