I feel we're deserting him ...

"We come and we leave. We take our pictures and go. I feel we're deserting him. I wish I'd never stopped photographing the people we met. I wish I could have stayed with the project my whole life."

Richard Avedon after a 2003 reunion meeting with Richard Wheatcroft, a subject Avedon first photographed in 1983 for In the American West.

Tim McLaughlin

Photographer and writer based in Vancouver, Canada