Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Fuji X-E3 - 18 February 2024

 

People say that Latin-Americans are more passionate. Perhaps that is the reason why I am excited about photography even though I am 82. And I will not use that hateful word "still"!

I always abhorred the concept of using photography to record. Sort of like a photographer I once knew who was recording fire hydrants.

When I take a photograph I try to be original. A friend used to tell me, “Alex, it’s been done before.” For a while I did not know what to say. One day I saw the light and I shouted at him, “I, have not done it yet.”

I remember going to shows in that last century at the fabulous Exposure Gallery on Vancouver’s Beatty Street. There was one photographer who had lovely bodyscapes on the wall and told me, “Alex isn’t it wonderful how a woman’s body can look like a Sahara sand dune?” I felt superior as I had done stuff like that years before. Then I thought, “Alex photographers go through different cycles in their careers. Few are on the same page. I must be less smug as they will leave their bodyscapes and go to the next phase whatever it might be.”

The Mundane Bodyscape

And lastly I dealt with pushy magazine art directors in Vancouver, Rick Staehling and Chris Dahl, and many good ones in Toronto. Their mantra was that my photographs had to be either unusual or different. Invariably they were right in their suggestions.

Could it be possible to record a fire hydrant in a different way?

While I am known as a portrait photographer, in Mexico I shot lots of street photographs. With few instances I have not done that in Vancouver.

Presently I am going berserk using an attachment called a Lensbaby on my Fuji X-E3 digital camera. My friend Jeff Gin gifted me a wide angle and telephoto attachment for it. Last night I decided to go to the corner of Lougheed Highway and Willingdon with the setup. I arrived when it was sundown.

A Lensbaby in Venice

I believe that my photographs are indeed different. I also believe that a photographer, just like a Wild West gunfighter, must be as good as his last shot.

 

Monday, February 17, 2025

Left- Helleborus x niger 'Honeyhill Joy' & Helleborus 'Honeydew' 17 February 2025

 

Today marked a beginning in my Kitsilano garden. I removed a few dead canes from my roses and some leaves. Then I noticed the lilac-coloured Helleborus ‘Honeydew’. Rosemary would have smiled upon seeing it as she would have understood that our garden had a pleasant future and that both of us would work at it to make it perfect.

At the same time I remember a striking quote from my one of my two (the other is Julio Cortázar) favourite Argentine novelists Ernesto Sábato. Until 1953 he was a nuclear physicist who for a while worked with Curies in France. He lost his excitement in the future of nuclear energy so he became a novelist. This quote below (in Spanish) is important. I will do my best to translate it.

"La fama es un conjunto de malentendidos, ya se sabe. Es vivir en una vitrina, y para colmo desnudo, porque no hay desnudez más genuina y terrible que la expresión artística, si es auténtica; toda obra de arte es una autobiografía, no en el sentido literal de la palabra, sino en el sentido más profundo y grave: un árbol de Van Gogh es Van Gogh, es su propia y desnuda alma ante nosotros".

"That fame is a combination of misunderstandings is known. It is to live in a glass showcase, and to make it worse, to be nude, because there is no more genuine nakedness, and terrible, than artistic expression, if it is authentic; all work of art is an autobiography, not in the literal sense, but in the most profound and serious: a Van Gogh tree is Van Gogh, it is his own and naked soul that is before us."

Somehow, if I am to understand Sábato, the scan here of the two hellebores, and Rosemary’s framed portrait are Rosemary.

And perhaps even me?

Thursday, February 13, 2025

Lana Victoria Lam - Piano - Michael Morimoto Alto Saxophone - 13 February 2025

 

Sometimes I define Vancouver’s cultural scene as sterile. But I reconsider and believe that in many ways our city is avant-garde. That became obvius tonight at the West Point Grey United Church.

How is this discrepancy possible? With the death of our city journalism and the CBC’s stress on bridge traffic, one of the few ways of knowing what is going on in our city is through email subscription to friends in the arts.

 

 Note the error in the program. Allison Balcetis did not play an alto but a tenor.

An thus I found out about tonight’s concert. I received a communication from my composer and saxophonist friend Colin MacDonald.

It seems that every few years there is a conference in the UBC School of music of prodigious Canadian saxophonists.

Before I delve into the concert, I do want to make clear that not only am I an amateur music critic but in 1958 I played the alto saxophone (and ancient silver coloured Selmer one) at St.Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas. It seems that I was good enough to not only be in the school band but also in the jazz band. After Texas I quit.

Tonight’s concert featured (is this possible?) and arrangement of Claude Debussy’s Rapsodie. It seems that it was commissioned by a female sax player who was deaf by the time, 20 years later when Debussy finished it.

Just on that composition, had my friends of the Turning Point Ensemble know about it, they would have surely been present.

For me what was unusual is that Chinley Hinacay (a Filipino cababayan of mine) played both the soprano and tenor saxophone. He would hold one of them while playing the other.

When the well-dressed Kris Covlin played Charles Stolte's True Confessions solo piece I was into new territory. Colin MacDonald explained that all the different sounds and dissolves were in fact clearly written on the music. There were moments when a sound would come out and then Covlin would allow it to sneak away into oblivion. Since I was on the front row I could hear those sounds.

Holly De Caigny, when she played David Lang's Press Release, I discovered that the composition had nothing to do with newspapers but about the saxophone action of pressing and releasing keys.

 Allison Balcetis, wearing a most colourful dress, played a tenor saxophone.  I was blown away by sounds she made by just tapping the instrument’s keys. She made sounds by overblowing, that back in my day, would have shot me down by my band teacher Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. Last night simply revealed to me to what extent the music of the saxophone has evolved into this century.

That is something that Colin MacDonald amply proved with his compositions. While others tonight did fabulous arrangements, MacDonald was the only composer. One was even based on an obscure pre-Bach composition.

Finally at the end, after all those dissonant noises (I am used to them as I like Bartók) Michael Morimoto on alto saxophone and Lana Victoria Lam on piano played a long and nicely sweet composition. I was able to drive home without a care in my world

Rose Yam - Chinley Hinacay & Matthew Robinson

Kris Covlin

Holly De Caigny

Colin MacDonald

Allison Balcetis

Lana Vitoria Lam & Michael Marimoto

 

Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Lauren - 2009

 

A few years ago before my friend Mark Budgen (a paragon of stability he was) died we discussed what was happening in the 21st century. I had written a blog in 2009 (link below) and a couple more about the fact that the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carol) was accused by some in having an unhealthy relationship with the young Alice Liddell. Budgen and I both new that he had never boated with her without a cousin or friend companion of Liddell’s. We also knew that in the second half of the 19^th century, and particularly in Victorian England, children were treated as adults and worked long hours in factories just like adults.

The Serious Ones 

No Smiles 

Between Child & Woman

I wrote a review in 1993 of Sally Mann’s book Immediate Family for Celia Duthie’s The Reader. Since then, and particularly in this century, her book has been banned in many US public libraries.

As soon as Rosemary and I had children, I photographed them as they grew up. And when my youngest daughter Hilary had two daughters I photographed them until they were teenagers. My profession as a portrait photographer  and my style involved them facing me with my camera at the same height as their eyes. I was inspired by 19^th century photographer Julia Margaret Cameron as none of her subjects ever smiled. The photographs, I have hundreds, have this almost disarming serious gaze.

As I understand, I was not criticized in that past century, as I had the alibi that I was their grandfather.

Now in this century I wonder if that alibi would fly?