Thursday, November 26, 2020

 

 

July 31 2020

 

 

At first, as a boy, I was ambivalent about luck. It seemed on my block on Melián, in Coghlan, a suburb of Buenos Aires, that the only people who won the lottery lived across the street. On the other hand the only people who died were my neighbours. That, even at my young age, seemed to be a balanced state of affairs.

After close to 45 years of working in an unventilated darkroom while smoking a pipe (I gave it up 20 years ago) and immersing my processed photographs and b+w negatives into Kodak Selenium Toner (a known carcinogen) at my age of 78, I am in more or less good health. I know I will never win the lottery but death will come to me (soon perhaps) and not to my neighbour.

I am thankful for those 78 years as I believe that after half a century, anything extra is just plain good luck.

In my heart I am grateful to all the women who preceded me (while not ignoring my father). There was my grandmother who educated me, my mother who wasted good money on my education. And then the women after. My Rosemary who married me in Mexico City in1968 and took my life and put order into it, She gave me two more women, our daughters Alexandra and Hilary and decided we needed to move to Vancouver where our lives might be better (and they were). And then Hilary had two daughters, our granddaughters Rebecca and Lauren. 

 

In our little Kitsilano home we have a beautiful orange and white cat called Niño. But it is his sister Niña who rests on my lap when I am in bed. It is then that I know that my life is one in which I must give thanks. And this I do.

Saturday, November 21, 2020

 In his 1979 book Arabia, Jonathan Raban describes how he eventually was able to, "Just be sitting at table among mosquitoes with glasses of Stella beer..." with his fellow travel writer of note, Jan Morris when both happened to be in Cairo. He tells it like this:

As James Morris, she had lived in Cairo on a houseboat in the 1950s. James Morris had been the correspondent in the Middle East for the London Times, and before that he had worked for a news bureau. Jan Morris, commissioned by Rolling Stone Magazine, was revisiting Cairo for the first time since she had changed gender, and she was nervous about what Jan might see in James's city."

Or as Morris herself told Raban, "I'm so frightened of going back to places and finding that I liked them better as I was than I do as I am."


Like most men I have been sexually confused many times. I remember the first time. I was around 7 years old and the day was such a shock to me that I even remember I was in a colectivo (a Buenos Aires bus) on the fashionable then (and now) Avenida Esmeralda. A woman got on with a strange little person. He or she was wearing a dress but he or she had a shaved head. Until then I thought that boys and men had short hair and wore pants (short or long but preferably short) and girls and women wore skirts or dresses and had long hair. I was confused. Was she a boy or was he a girl?



My second moment of sexual confusion happened when I was around 8. It was a Buenos Aires carnaval and people dressed up and sprayed each other with pomos which were large toothpaste type tubes made of metal and full of perfumed water. I had gone to see a western with my grandmother on movie theatre row on Avenida Lavalle.



We were in the subte (the Buenos Aires underground) on our way to Retiro train station to take me home. From my vantage point I could see the end of the other subway car and there was a woman's bare back facing me. She had long hair but something was wrong. Her back did not look like a woman's. What could she possibly be? I was confused.



Not long after an American girl came to my house to play and asked me, "Do you want to see it?" I was much too naive to figure out what exactly I was going to see. When I saw it, "it" did not resemble at all what my precocious (so I thought) friend Mario had told me that girls had up front. I was confused again.



In more recent times I have been repelled by the usual macho reaction to seeing two women together. These are usually photographs of gorgeous women with red fingernails and fantastic bodies interacting on divans. It ocurred to me that there are better and more interesting ways of showing these most feminine activities. A film, Bitter Moon directed by Roman Polanski comes to mind every time I think of this. In this film both Peter Coyote and Hugh Grant (both playing idiots) are left in the lurch in the end by the two women of their life, Kristin Scott Thomas and Emmanuelle Seigner. When these two abandon their men and proceed to dance with each other I was wonderfully shocked.



I had something of the sort in mind when I placed Ms. Hernandez and Cordelia in front of my Ikea mirror.




In one of the many books by Jan Morris that I have read I remember a wonderful sentence that she wrote upon seeing a large portrait of British Lord Admiral John Arbuthnot Fisher. I recall that Morris wrote something like, "The man that I was, admired the man that is in front of me and the woman that I am, could possibly have loved the man that he was."

She was never confused. I am sometimes.

Wednesday, November 18, 2020

 

My Argentina has at least four definitive novels about itself written in the 19th and 20^th century (not to forget the short fiction and poems by Borges) but there is another, actually a poem/novel written in 1872, by José Hernández called El Gaucho Martín Fierro. It is all about the pushing back (through war much like in the American West) by the military of the native Argentine population as related about a man, Martín Fierro who is forcibly conscripted. Women are rarely mentioned except in on situation where Hernández mentions “la china del fierro”. In Argentina a china (there were few if any in the 19^th century) is an almost derogative term for “his woman” with perhaps a darker complexion.

For me, having been born in Buenos Aires in 1942, places outside of my country were exotic. I thought that Americans lived in an island called Columbia and they had broad shoulders (I had seen photographs of American football players) wearing strange head pieces. Mexico was a place where men slept under cactus while wearing a large hat and in Germany, grown men wore pants.

But the most exotic was the Far East even though I knew my mother and grandmother had been born in the Philippines. But since they were of Spanish/Basque stock they did not look exotic.

I must have been 8 or 9 when my mother took me to lunch at the house of her students who were part of the Chinese delegation to Argentina. I had noticed the girls (they were all girls) before because they seemed to be geniuses in arithmetic. Eating the strange food was my first experience with Chinese food.

My father a journalist for the Buenos Aires Herald in 1950 moonlighted as a translator for the newly established Indian Embassy. Because my father was a daring cook he invited his turbaned buddies from the embassy for a home-cooked curry. That is when my street friends and I saw our first Sikhs.

To any Argentine the furthest place from our county is la Cochinchina. This was the 19^th century naming by the French of Vietnam. When we want to insult someone without using obscene words we tell them to go “¡vete a la Cochinchina!” Somehow that country I Spanish sounds like an obscene word.

So when I had my chance to photograph a lovely woman from Vietnam, Lisa Ha, I jumped many times in glee as I would finally remove from my 20^th century idea of what was exotic, now in the 21^st era of globalization, perhaps a more realistic one.

It could have ended there until a few days ago when I read in my Sunday NY Times Book Review Magazine about a novel by the Argentine female writer Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (who almost won the booker prize for a translated version of her novel in English called The Adventures of the China Iron). You would have thought that her novel in Spanish (written from the point of view of Fierro’s girl) would have been simply called Las Aventuras de la China Fierro. But no! She had to use the word in English “Iron” to make it all more hilarious.

The translators are Fiona Mackintosh and Iona Macintire. I plan to go to Buenos Aires as soon as I am able to travel so I can buy the novel in Spanish.

Meanwhile I will take comfort with these snaps of the exotic Lisa Ha.

Tuesday, November 17, 2020

 

En marzo del 2017 tuvímos una huésped por dos semanas en nuestra casita en el barrio Kitsilano de Vancouver. Sandrine Cassini es una bailarina francesa que durante unos años bailó para Ballet BC. Nos hicimos amigos y por varios años me posó. En esta ocasión mi foto favorita resultó esta que tomé con mi Mamiya RB-67 con película instantánea Fuji. La tomé sobre el diván psiquiátrico ubicado en nuestra pieza con el piano. No tuve que buscar mucho para encontrar esta hermosa poesía sobre las piernas de una mujer. Los escritores latinoamericanos para mí escriben con más sensualidad que sus colegas de otros idiomas. El caso del uruguayo Mario Benedetti es un caso en particular.

 Piernas

Las piernas de la amada son fraternas

Cuando se abren buscando el infinito

Y apelan al futuro como un rito

Que las hace más dulces y más tiernas.

Pero también las piernas son cavernas

Donde el eco se funde con el grito

Y cumplen con el viejo requisito

De buscar el amparo de otras piernas.

Si se separan como bienvenida, las piernas de la amada, hacen historia

Mantienen sus ofrendas y en seguida enlazan algún cuerpo en su memoria

Cuando trazan los signos de la vida

Las piernas de la amada son la gloria

Mario Benedetti

Monday, November 16, 2020

 

Many of the 20th century photographers I have admired since I became interested in photography around 1958 have been photographers who were not one-trick-ponies. They were versatile. One of the most versatile was Edward Steichen.

Edward Jean Steichen (March 27, 1879 – March 25, 1973) was a Luxembourg/American photographer, painter, and curator, who is widely renowned as one of the most prolific and influential figures in the history of photography.

Credited with transforming photography into an art form, Steichen's photographs were the photographs that most frequently appeared in Alfred Stieglitz's groundbreaking magazine Camera Work during its publication from 1903 to 1917, with Stieglitz hailing him as "the greatest photographer".

A pioneer of fashion photography, Steichen laid claim to his photos of gowns for the magazine Art et Décoration in 1911, being the first modern fashion photographs ever published. From 1923 to 1938, Steichen served as chief photographer for the Condé Nast magazines Vogue and Vanity Fair, while also working for many advertising agencies, including J. Walter Thompson. During these years, Steichen was regarded as the best known and highest paid photographer in the world.]

After the United States' entry into World War II, Steichen was invited by the United States Navy to serve as Director of the Naval Aviation Photographic Unit. In 1944, he directed the war documentary The Fighting Lady, which won the 1945 Academy Award for Best Documentary.

From 1947 to 1961, Steichen served as Director of the Department of Photography at New York's Museum of Modern Art. While there, he curated and assembled exhibits including The Family of Man, which was seen by nine million people. In 2003, the Family of Man photographic collection was added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register in recognition of its historical value.

In February 2006, a print of Steichen's early pictorialist photograph, The Pond—Moonlight (1904), sold for US$2.9 million—at the time, the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction.

Wikipedia

 

Not mentioned in the above Wikipedia citation  is the fact that in July 1928 he took the first ever Kotex ad with a woman in it. Also almost unknown is the fact that his model was Lee Miller who was a muse, assistant and a photographer for Man Ray. She then became a photojournalist in WWII (with that other potographer of note Margaret Bourke-White) and when Miller arrived in Munich in 1945 she insisted she be photographed in Hitler's  tub

 

At Macleod Books ( not only a Vancouver treasure but a Canadian treasure) I found Edward Steichen’s beautifully written and illustrated The Blue Ghost (the Japanese Navy nickname for the US carrier Lexington) which catalogues his stint on the Lexington from 9 November 1943 to 23 December 1923. In this book are his photographs and his staff of the torpedoing of the Lexington. 

 

 

 

This book amply shows that good photographs and good writing go hand in hand and jointly are better that one or the other.

 

 

The photograph of the cover of The Blue Ghost, a Grumman F6F Hellcat is justly famous because of its blur that demonstrates the speed of the plane taking off. Steichen explains how he shot it in the book. Read below. 

 

 My Steichen Blogs

One

Two

Three 

 

Sunday, November 15, 2020

 

Every time I drive on 12th Avenue past the Vancouver General Hospital I notice that their smokestack has been demolished. What is left of it is wrapped in what looks like surgically clean plastic.

I remember another time when for an article on VGH cuts for the Georgia Straight I must have convinced some nurse to pose for me and represent the despair of the effects of financial cuts to our hospital system.

For me hospitals began as a mysterious wonder. In our home in Buenos Aires in the early 50 on Melián Street empty but beautiful funeral carriages (with beveled windows) would trot (the horses had black plumes on their head) in the direction of the Pirovano Hospital on Monroe and Melián about five blocks away. They would return and I would be able to see the coffin inside.

The hospital to me was painted a menacingly dark green and I never did enter it.

My perception of that hospital changed when in 1966 at my desk as a conscript of the the Argentine Navy who translated documents for a US Naval Advisor I received a phone call from my almost-uncle Leo Mahdjubian. In his British English (even though an Armenian he had worn a kilt in the Black Watch in WWI) said, “Your father kicked the bucket yesterday in front of the Pirovano. A police sergeant took him in but he was pronounced dead. Because of the intervention of the policeman you must report to the police station to sign some documents.

At the police station the policeman at the desk told me that I could not possibly be the dead man’s son as the son had been there a few hours before to sign. That is how I soon got to meet my half brother.

The Sergeant who took my father to the Pirovano called me to tell me he had taken the liberty of emptying my father’s pockets as they would have disappeared in the hospital. He told me that there was a large sum of money in his pocket that my father was saving to bribe a General and get me out of my conscription.

At my age of 78 I wonder if my last days will be spent in a hospital or if I will directly go where even kings go alone.