When I look at a photograph I have taken I believe that I see a bit more than someone who has not taken it. And this is especially so if it is a family portrait.

There is also the important factor that time plays in the taking of a photograph. That first photograph that Daguerre took of a man having his shoes shined with what looks like an empty Paris Boulevard is not so. The exposure time was minutes long. Any movement behind that man would have been blurred. It has been said that Daguerre paid the man not to move.

Shutters also affect how a photograph is seen. Compur shutters like the one in Rolleiflexes close to the taking f-stop. This means that the whole photograph is about a moment in a precise time. Single lens 35mm film reflex cameras are not at all like that. Depending on the focal plane shutter involved a slit on a curtain (metal or cloth) moves horizontally or vertically. If you know that you camera shoots images that are upside-down on a group shot that is taken from head to toe, vertically on a camera like my cloth shutter Pentacon-F the heads of your subject are exposed before their feet. In Einsteinium time the faces are older than their feet. My photographs here were probably taken at 1/60 second.

There is another facet of time that hits me as the portrait photographer when I look at a portrait (two here) that I took of my Rosemary in Morelia, Mexico perhaps in 1969. She was alive. She was vibrant. I posed her with not much instruction. I was learning then. I was photographically unsophisticated. The two contact sheets have two different films. It would tell me that I used my Pentacon-F and my other camera an Asahi Pentax S-3. By then I had a little lab in our home so I processed the film.

It is most difficult to explain the feeling that I get that my Rosemary was a live human being now gone.

With time to spare I have been revisiting some of my photographs. Because I have a good flatbed scanner I like to sandwich two negatives or slides together. This method works better if the pictures are from the same session.

I have been unable to find any peers to show interest in this technique that requires having a scanner.

These two sandwiches are of my friend Tarren a former ecdysiast that had and has grace and good taste. The dog in the photograph is a stuffed one. He was very cooperative.

My photographs of all those ecdysiasts that faced my camera in the 80s were patient as I developed my ideas making lots of mistakes on the way. These ideas made me a better photographer.  

My favourite portrait of Vittorio Gassman was the one top right in the contact sheet. It was the first photograph

Around 1980, photographer and mountaineer Gary Regester was up on a mountain in his native Colorado. It was there that he saw a mountain tent. By then these tents did not have wooden poles, etc. They were held up by  fiberglass poles. It was at that moment that Register had one of those associations which I believe is one of the reasons we are humans. From “a what if?” he designed what we now know as photographers’ soft boxes. He called them Chimeras. Before Regester the idea of enclosing a flash inside a box to soften the shadows for portraits involved unwieldly boxes made of wood. These Chimeras could be quickly unmounted and stored in light carrying cases.

It was in the mid 80s that I went to New York City. I quickly went to Olden Cameras and asked for a Chimera. The man behind the counter did not understand. I told him to look it up in the Olden catalogue. That Chimera and a few bigger ones have served me well.

In the late 80s Gary Regester came to Vancouver and gave a lecture on equipment. He talked of a tripod head called an Arca Swiss. I was impressed. I mentioned it to my Rosemary who promptly gave it to me for Christmas. She spent over $600.

The Gary Regester Chimera and his recommended tripod head where involved in one my most favourite portraits.

I faced Italian actor Vittorio Gassman on January 6, 1991. I set up my medium format Mamiya RB-67 on the tripod and had two lights. One was a small Chimera and the other was a hair light. I focused my camera. It was then that Gassman told me he was going to think what he was going to do and closed his eyes. I immediately took the picture which was the first and the best of the 11I took.

There are some photographers that would state that a large camera on a tripod is a slow setup. I don’t believe I would have taken that photograph if I had had a 35mm camera in hand. The stationary setup enabled me to take that picture the second I saw it.

Yesterday I called Gary Regester to thank him for his inspiration and for teaching me something about associating two disparate objects (the mountain tent that led to his Chimera). He was gracious. I call this sort of thing that I have been doing a lot of recently “tying up loose ends" which is a very good American expression.

Rosemary and Alexandra at the Museum of Anthropology - Mexico - 1968

 

"Se puede matar todo menos la nostalgia, la llevamos en el color de los ojos, en cada amor, en todo lo que profundamente atormenta y desata y engaña".

Julio Cortázar

“You can kill everything except nostalgia, we have it in the colour of our eyes, in every love, and in everything that profoundly torments us, unleashes, and cheats.”[my translation]

The Brazilians have a lovely word for nostalgia, saudade. I was much too dense to figure out until the end of the 20^th century that in order to have nostalgia for a place you have to be in another place.

My nostalgia is complex as I have a nostalgia for the Argentina I left in 1952, the one I returned for almost three years in 1965 and the repeated times that I went back as a journalist and with my Rosemary and our two granddaughters. I have quadruple nostalgia for Mexico, the one I went to in 1953 with my mother and grandmother, the one I returned to after my four year period in St. Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas and then the Mexico City of from 1967 to 1975 with my Rosemary and two daughters. That last one is the many times that Rosemary and I returned to Mexico sometimes with our granddaughters.

This idea of nostalgia became strong when in the late 90s I met Argentine painters Nora Patrich and Juan Manuel Sánchez. We had a large show at a Granville gallery of our photographs, drawings and paintings that expressed our rosy nostalgia for our Argentina.

What makes my nostalgia especially strong is that my father was a good friend of Julo Cortázar. Cortázar would come to our Buenos Aires home in Coghlan and the writer would send me out to get  him Argentine cigarettes as he had a disdain for my father’s Player’s Navy Cuts.

And then there is that Canadian nostalgia that somehow was unleashed right here in Vancouver. Cortázar’s protagonist in his novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) is freezing in a Paris winter. He buys a flannel shirt which Cortázar calls “una canadiense”

Many of my photographs, especially my portraits are motivated by nostalgia. 

George Waterhouse Hayward

"Muchas veces me siento solo. Pero tengo amigos, pocos pero buenos; tengo gente que me quiere. Y tengo además un refugio que no todos tienen y es el hecho de que esencialmente soy un escritor. Mal escritor, buen escritor, eso no importa. Lo importante es poder refugiarme en la literatura, eso es lo que más me ayuda a escapar de la soledad".

Jorge Luis Borges

Many times I feel alone. But I have friends, a few but good one; I have people that love me. And I have besides a refuge that not all people have, and this is that essentially I am a writer. A bad writer, a good writer, that is not important. What is important is to find a shelter with literature, that is what helps me to escape solitude. [my translation].

It is a paradox that my father was a journalist and all I have of him is a bit of his signature on his King James Bible. When he died one of the items in his pocket was his Libreta de Enrolamiento which was his identity document. I was too stupid to keep it and I returned it to the authorities. It had his writing.

In a trip back to Buenos Aires in the 90s I went to the Buenos Aires Herald where he had worked as a journalist and found nothing in their files.

My mother told me that my father was a good writer who would write pieces on Perón that Perón did not like so my father spent weeks in a political prison called Villa Devoto.

My mother was a fine poet. I have a large collection of her poems.

Perhaps then, I might have inherited something from my parents which is why I write. My first article was a cover article for Vancouver Magazine in 1982 when I wrote my experience of participating in a coup when I was a conscript in the Argentine Navy.

After that I often wrote for that magazine, for Western Living, for the Georgia Straight, for the Tyee, for the Province and for the Vancouver Sun. I wrote travel stories as magazines would save on that writer plane ticket as I was the photographer and writer.

But it was in 2006 when made my webpage that I started my blog. I was unsure what exactly that was supposed to be. Since then I have been writing about my personal experiences of my past but also of events here in Vancouver. To date I have written 6618 blogs. I like to use the Spanish word for a ship’s log and I call my blog a bitácora.

On of my mentors from Vancouver Magazine says I am a lousy writer and that I need an editor. I take Borges’s words that it is not necessary to be a good writer. You fight and I fight solitude with my daily routine. That, my photography and plant scanning keep me distracted from my melancholy in not having my Rosemary with me.

I just wish that somehow I could reach my father and ask him if I am that bad of a writer.