About The Great Mirror

This site contains a bit over 25,000 photos I took during a long career beginning in 1968 at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, and ending in 2018 at the University of Oklahoma.  I took the pictures for classroom use and also so I’d remember what I had seen, but I have never had any interest in photography as an art in itself, nor have I developed or wished to develop any skill in using cameras.  I believe that the pictures have gradually gotten less blurry and less underexposed, but the credit for this improvement belongs to my cameras, not to me.  My wife tells me I still don’t focus properly, to which I say, at age 80-plus, that the pictures, at least since I tossed freestanding cameras and began using my phone, look focussed to me.

I find the “timeline” very helpful, but it works only for pictures taken after 2000.  I wish it weren’t so, but I can’t fix it.

In recent years I have tended to incorporate pictures copied from other sources, usually historical, because they cast light on the subject.  I’ve tried to credit the sources of these pictures but have not always succeeded.  I’m happy to add sources when chided through SEC650@gmail.com

The captions have evolved over the years and become, in general, longer and longer, which will annoy viewers demanding consistency or homogeneity,

Since I retired in 2018, I've also become a perfervid podcaster under the title Bret Wallach's Itinerant Geographer, available, as they say, wherever you get your podcasts. I personally like the Substack, but what do I know?