Alfonso de la Cruz started doing photography when he became a dad, which meant that he was wandering Vancouver with a camera in hand while his infant daughter was strapped to him in an Ergobaby carrier.
He picked up the hobby to document his daughter’s life. But after he hit the streets looking for subjects, he got hooked.
“I wish I discovered it sooner,” said de la Cruz, 36, who just self-published a book of his street photography titled Ordinary Mysticism. “I never saw the world through a lens.”
He started off shooting on an Olympus Pen FT, a nifty half-frame camera that squeezes two photos into a single frame of 35-millimetre film, doubling the shots you can typically get onto a single roll. De la Cruz has since found his tool of choice in the legendary Rolleiflex, which shoots on 120-mm film, much larger than the standard 35 mm.
The pictures are incredibly fun (and funny) to look at.
There’s nothing pretentious about them, just Vancouverites having picnics, playing chess, riding bikes, tanning at the beach, strolling the Granville strip.
A dude doing a handstand on a fence? A lady guzzling a large bottle of orange Perrier in the middle of the sidewalk? Why not.
Animals are often in the frame, from sassy shop cats and dogs wearing ties to seagulls in a frenzy as they steal fries.





Looking at his pictures, you wouldn’t know that de la Cruz is a relative beginner or that some of them might have been taken with a child in tow.
That’s because de la Cruz’s day job is all about colour and light. He works in animation as a senior lighting and compositing artist. He has a resumé of hits under his belt, including the two acclaimed Spider-Verse films.
Creating images with a camera might be completely different from the total control one is afforded on a computer, but Cruz says it’s all part of “visual dialogue.”
“At work, everything can get overwhelming,” he says. “This feels more natural.”
With his experience, it’s no wonder the colours and textures are so eye-popping. Clad in pink furs and baggy leathers, sporting cowboy hats and aquamarine lipstick, his Vancouver subjects are captured in the beautiful light of the city’s summer glows and winter sunsets.
His photos on the Granville strip hearken back to the period between the 1930s and ’50s, when photographers solicited passersby to take their picture for a fee. Like all Vancouver photographers, he can’t help but be inspired by the works of the great Fred Herzog.





Film photography has seen a resurgence in recent years. CBC reports that it’s fuelled by a love for all things analogue, “like vinyl,” but the availability of digital tools has played a part too: scanners, post-processing software, platforms like Instagram for sharing and socializing, and hundreds of young YouTube enthusiasts reviewing gear and film stocks created long before they were born.
Thanks to these tutorials, de la Cruz has moved on from availing himself of the photo processing services at London Drugs, like many locals. He now develops his film at home in his kitchen.
De la Cruz might not be as young as some of the gen-Zs getting into the hobby, but he knows his Rolleiflex — manufactured between 1959 and 1960 — is older than he is.
It’s a tall box of a camera, wielded with two hands, with the viewfinder mounted on top, which the user looks down into to frame the shot. Vivian Maier, the American caregiver whose black-and-white street photography was famously discovered after her death, used a Rolleiflex.
With his camera in need of repair, de la Cruz connected with local legend Horst Wenzel, who used to work for the German Rollei camera manufacturing company before moving to Vancouver and becoming a beloved camera technician and fixture in the local photography community.
“He retired but still fixed cameras in his basement in Dunbar,” said de la Cruz. “I took this camera to him and he overhauled it — [said] it’s going to be good for 30 more years.”
De la Cruz’s camera, like many others that Wenzel repaired, would outlive the man himself. Wenzel died earlier this summer at age 84.
De la Cruz is already passing his love for photography to the next generation. His daughter is now four, no longer needing a sling or stroller.
“She has a camera,” he said, “and we do photo walks together.”
Alfonso de la Cruz can be found on Instagram at @ponchorama.
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