Ross and I met at a party last year, and after discovering that we lived on the same block, became friends. Sometimes I’d visit Ross at his apartment, a whitewashed brick studio three floors above Fan Tan Alley, which is the narrowest street in Canada, set within the country’s oldest Chinatown. He’d fallen for the place, he said, thirty years earlier when he attended a bash there, and by some ecstatic luck, he’d found work moving the tenant out early last summer and was offered the apartment. Ross hadn’t much furniture beyond a bed, and let the soft glow of a few old lamps linger in the simple space, giving it an atmosphere of self-contained, honest comfort—a true embodiment of who Ross is. He liked to relax on the mattress with his high-tops on and flip through stacks of hoarded newspapers. The tape deck nearby was a constant thrum of old rock cassettes, and he’d tell me about his life over a beer. On his right hand, he wore a hair-elastic wrapped around the wedding ring that belonged to his late father, a man who couldn’t understand why Ross had turned into a long-haired hippie and left Saskatoon for Vancouver in the late 1960’s. Leonard Cohen was the first album Ross bought on the West Coast, since “Suzanne”—a song Cohen wrote about a woman he desired but ultimately couldn’t have—was all over the radio. I photographed Ross on a Sunday afternoon in December, not long after Cohen’s death was in the paper. I didn’t know then, the significance that headline on the bed beside him would come to hold: later that month, Ross had to leave the home he’d coveted for so many years.
Rather than documenting a single moment within this portrait, I wanted to replicate an entire afternoon with Ross, evoking the passage of time by duplicating his hands and face, capturing the last vestiges of his routine in that space.