Jane Rule - April 1991

Have written a few times about my love for reading the first paragraph on the first page of any book before I decide about buying it.

First Paragraphs

There is one book that I never bought because it was sent to me by the publisher. It is Jane Rule’s posthumous autobiography Taking My Life  (2011 Talon Books). I wrote about it here and here

Circa 1980s

In this elegant, beautiful, wonderful book, one so good I keep it as my-behind- the-toilet-on-the-tank stellar reading material, there is a killer first paragraph:

Writing an autobiography may be a positive way of taking my own life. Beginning in the dead of winter, mortal with abused lungs and liver, my arthritic bones as incentive for old age, I may be able to learn to value my life as something other than the hard and threateningly pointless journey it has often seemed. I have never been suicidal but often stalled, as I have been now for some months, not just directionless but unconvinced that there is one. No plan for a story or novel can rouse my imagination, which resolutely sleeps, feeding on the fat of summer. And so I take my life, with moral and aesthetic misgivings, simply because there is nothing else to do.

Perhaps because of my constant rereading of it I somehow did not give more than one glance and read of the second:

I remember remembering when I was born. My practical young mother said nobody could. But I did remember dreaming and dreaming and that first waking to the hard light. By the time she read me Mary Poppins, I realized that I, like most people, had forgotten not just my birth but apparently the language of birds, the ability to fly, to walk into the landscape of pictures and to be home among the stars. Just that one sensation remained – the painful brightness. It was not enough to make me into Mary Poppins, but memory became for me the earliest self-discipline I had. I couldn’t, after I learned to write, keep a diary, just as I couldn’t later take notes in lectures. Writing anything down seemed a way of forgetting it. I wanted to memorize my life so that whatever experience taught I would not forget. The difficulty, of course, is that what may seem to be static interference could be instead the very melody of life, the dismissed clutter, the real furniture of the soul. The fear of such loss, even our starkest nightmares, are consolation, for they store and restore to us things we have not chosen to recall.

In jest (and before I read Jane Rule's Taking My Life ) I used to include in some of my bios: 

My birth was recorded in a Buenos Aires hospital with the burst of a magnesium flash. I knew then  I would some day become a photographer.

I can imagine Jane Rule smiling had I ever told her that.

Stability and Honesty (almost an alien concept for this Argentine-born and sometime Mexican). Stability and honesty is how I would define John Turner.

John Turner, Ron Basford & Audrey Hepburn

They say that coincidences are more often than not.

When I first saw my Rosemary from the rear (she was yet to be my Rosemary) I marvelled at her legs. They matched the excellence of my mother’s. Both my mother and Rosemary shared that upbringing of being gracious and well-mannered. From my grandmother Lolita Rosemary “inherited” that special talent of knowing when to move on when a near future was not predictably a good one.

My grandmother as a widow took her three children from Manila to the Bronx and they prospered. Just before the stock market crash, they moved back to Manila. She saw a war coming and again they moved, this time to Buenos Aires in 1938. In 1954 with Perón in charge of Argentina we moved to Mexico City.

It was in 1974 that Rosemary told me that she thought that Canada would be a better place for our two daughters. She said that Montreal would be tough as I knew no French and that I would not like Toronto because of the snow.

We moved to Vancouver and to this day I cannot fault her decision. Nor can I fault her insistence that we purchase a house in Kerrisdale in 1986. Thanks to that decision we sold well recently and were able to inherit our two daughters while we are still alive.

But there is one more thing about my Rosemary’s foresight. It has been in Canada where I have enjoyed stability (unknown in my Argentina or in Mexico). This includes a stability of good electricity, fresh air and clean water.

I participated in a coup as a conscript sailor. I met a young lieutenant who years later slit the stomachs of left-wing prisoners and dumped them into the River Plate from a helicopter. I was used to that and almost found it normal as it was to bribe Mexico City traffic cops.

In Mexico the four of us lived with the corruption of politicians, police and a terrible postal system.

All that, is gone. And there is one incident that has always been in my memory and my heart. And this is of going to a neighbourhood meeting hosted by Prime Minister John Turner. There were no police or soldiers with machine guns outside. We were served coffee and doughnuts. I could not have imagined that anywhere else.

I believe that the scandals that happen in any country are to be expected but, the little ones here in Canada in comparison, are events that still allow me to sleep nights.

I remember years ago when Premier Vander Zalm when he was at the bottom of his popularity wanted to show the CP rail yard behind the CP Station to a mayor friend from Holland. I was hired by CP to take the photograph. I waited outside the station. Vander Zalm arrived. He parked and put coins into the meter and crossed the street with his friend. The Premier was wearing a very nice leather jacket. He had no body guards. Only in Canada!

I wrote about taking a portrait of John Turner for Vancouver Magazine here and how that became memorable in connection with Audrey Hepburn.

John Turner died yesterday. I remember his easy going way, his honest smile and the fact that he remembered me in that restaurant so many years ago.

Yes, it is strange how my Rosemary inherited all those talents from my family. And it did help that Rosemary is Canadian.

And I am too.

September 10 , 2020

In this last year I have had a difficulty driving at night because my right eye cataract got worse and incoming headlights, particularly on rainy evenings, formed distracting halos on my windshield. Besides the fact that my right eye was always a poor one (probably because as a boy I liked to read in bed while leaning and covering on that eye) of late I could not really read street signs very well.

So on September 10^th Doctor Simon Warner removed my cataract and installed a corrective transplant cornea.

It has been a revelation to this obsolete, retired, redundant and inconsequential photographer.

It was my Portland bassist friend, Curtis Daily who quite a few months ago told me that a cataract modified how I saw colours. I did not believe him until one day I looked at puffy white clouds. I closed my good eye (it has the beginnings of a cataract) and suddenly the white cloud had a yellow cast. Using my old Kodak filters (in my mind’s memory)for printing colour negatives I calculated that the right eye was adding a 10 yellow and 5 red to the mix. Those of you who are photographers might know that the addition of yellow makes blues turn into a beginning of green. Puffy white clouds with all that UV in the sky become less “blue” cast.

Suddenly as my vision became better with my fixed eye the white doors and closet mouldings of our room were no longer cream. They were a startling bluish white, particularly when I closed my left eye. And if I closed my right eye I could discern a yellow warming of those doors.

On Thursday as I walked out of my oficina I noticed that one particular blue hosta was really blue. This past year and perhaps even on the other my built in yellow filter had greened the blue of that hosta and others.

On November 28 of last year my fantastic and slim model and friend Olena came to pose for me in our piano room. My goal was to achieve a correct skin colour that would show of her pale whiteness. I used the light coming in from outside and I adjusted at various settings my Fuji X-E3’s colour balance (in Degrees Kelvin). I was very happy with the results. These results would have been almost impossible using either negative colour or slide film. There is that one very big advantage in my books to digital over film. This is the ability to make the colours we see to be accurate when viewed on a print or on a well calibrated monitor.

Or so I thought! I am placing here that original corrected Olena photograph and a second one that I further corrected now that I have a good right eye. The moment I look at this photograph with both eyes open I note a warming of her skin.

 Who would have known? I now know how personal our perception of colour is. 

The colour of skin 

Kodachrome and the nature of light 

How orange is Donald Trump?

As magazines and newspapers began to wane in the late 90s, local writer and editor, Paul Sullivan began to use the term “citizen journalism.” In one case he hired some Vancouver prostitutes to write for him at no pay. I was repelled by the idea of the non payment. Now in this 21^st century I find that we citizens have to pitch in if the media decide to not work on holidays and ignore people’s deaths until later.

Freelance journalist Glenda Bartosh informed me via email today that Kay Alsop died on Sunday a bit past her 100th. It is difficult for me to corroborate Bartosh’s communication and I will take my chances.

In 1987 Kay Alsop was a YWCA Woman Of Distinction. A few years later, probably 1992, the YWCA decided to publish a magazine with portraits of some of the past winners. I took those portraits and one of them was the most gracious and lovely former fashion writer for the Province, Kay Alsop. I had met her a few times before in the Vancouver Sun/Province newsroom and I came to the conclusion that Alsop prevented the really styleless Province from being so. I felt like going to her and saying, "How can a classy gal like you work in a place like this?"

When I met her at her home for her photos she told me she loved her white camellia. This would mean that I must have taken the pictures in early spring of 1992. Malcolm Parry had been a columnist for the Vancouver Sun for about a year. I asked her about him. Kay Alsop smiled at me with that beautiful smile of hers and said, "Mac will turn off the lights at the Sun."

In September 2020, I can safely and accurately define myself as being obsolete, redundant, retired and inconsequential.

But I can also add to that finality, that before it, many faced my camera. I looked at Bif’s folder today and found these. Instead of scanning the medium format (6x7cm negatives) I opted for scanning the contact sheets. I kind of like them.

I look at them and they represent that magic concept (when one looks back) of a moment in which I was too busy snapping my photographs to consider that someday, many years later, I would be looking at them and being inspired to write this short blog.

This whole year I have been fruitlessly trying to figure out that idea and not being aware of its enormity (then), (even if a small one such as Bif posing for me in the best room of that seedy Marble Arch) when looking back at it in this most present moment.

Much has been written about one’s life passing by one’s eyes at a time of an imminent accident when death seems to be in the works.

My friend George Bowering has nicely argued that a photo that I took of him was of him but not him. Would this be Bif in a past? 

But there is another concept concerning time and of those moments then recorded with my camera and then years later remembering them through my archives. Some four billion years ago a couple of black holes got together and massively exploded.We know this because the noise and light has just reached our earth. I am wondering now if that event is sort of like my memory but backwards. The reality of that explosion is now something that just happened as we only now know of it. There was nobody around to record that memory of so long ago. Is this reality also a memory?