Photography by James Marsh

I have had an interest in photography since my 20s, when my friend Phil Balsam helped me pick out a used 35mm Minolta at Toronto Camera on Yonge Street, Toronto. I never mastered film, avoiding slides and wasting years paying to make prints. A whole important part of my life was lost with the Polaroid camera, not because it took bad pictures but because I gave most of them away to the subjects. I still have a 35mm Rollie with which I took most of the photos of my young daughter.

It took quite a while for me to learn on a digital camera and quite a while for digital cameras to take good pictures. Once I got away from focussing on pixels and back to understanding that great lenses are needed to take good photographs, I have felt liberated and able to concentrate on what I love about photography–seeing and remembering the world as I experience it.