I believe that however dire the situation, one should always look for ways to help.

However helpless one may be in the circumstances, awareness is essential. And awareness comes with involvement. And so with the disappearing buildings around the world, where one needs to be conscious of what once was.

Although I have been away from my home country for decades and have but few physical connections now, I can still remember what I grew up with. I remember with some degree of loss. Back then I had neither the opportunity nor the means to photograph the country’s historic sites: the temples, the monuments, the relics, and the very places where these are.

But now in Manitoba, whose history is nowhere near as long as my country’s, I could do something.

It was this experience, perhaps, and perhaps a subconscious desire to catch up with my past that motivates this project to record for posterity.

Please refer to my earlier blog to see how I believe it happened. Not as a conscious and determined effort but as a seeping into my consciousness.

I now had the means and the opportunity to do what I was not able to do as a kid: to record to my heart’s content whatever historical artifacts still remained. Indeed that is how my collection of photographs of places of worship in Manitoba came about. I have over 700 of them recorded on film.

As time went by I went looking for these vanishing buildings. At the time I had no guides, no directions. We had two copies of the Manitoba Road Map. The one copy in constant use was tattered and marked. The other was a spare, just in case.