Arbolito Cubano
Tango en Carmesí 
Melancolía
Tango Sobrio 
Tango excelencia 
Diós apenas toca el arpa
Voleos
Carlos Gavito

In many respects it is good to live in a third-world country. Consider my native Argentina and its cosmopolitan Buenos Aires.

In the 60s when I was living there I would tell my friends from Mexico and the United States that Argentina was one of the first countries in Latin America where women were using the brand new contraceptive pill in spite of their, in some cases, extreme allegiance to the Roman Catholic church.

It was Juan Domingo Perón in the early 50s who ushered in the idea that Industria Argentina could compete with imported products. I remember avoiding anything with that on the label in those 50s, desiring always to secure a bootleg pair of Levis and Double Bubble chewing gum to go with them.

Eventually Argentine manufacturers saw the light and produced wonderful leather and wool products. The wine industry became important. Perón attempted (a futile gesture) to build an Argentine car and fighter jet. But their atomic power research did in the end produce viable reactors. If they wanted my Argentina could build an atom bomb.

It is this kind of protectionism that is now so much in vogue in the rest of the world.

Argentina is still a third-world country with massive problems in the national debt and a political polarization the rivals that of the United States.

But in our last trip to Argentina last September I did note some of the advantages. In any evening there are hundreds of bookstores open. The newspapers are still relevant although newsstands now carry toys, lapel pins and football club T-shirts.

The transport system in Buenos Aires is first class. Only my wealthy relatives, the O’Reilly’s boast that they have not been on a train, bus or subway in more than 30 years.

But there is one item, a throwback to that last century that keeps me smiling when I visit my native city. This is that while Argentine women are as feminist as any in other countries (they have their own Me-too movement and a woman vice president who at one time was president) they have not lost their sense of elegance which their sex represents (I am reluctant to use the word I wanted to use, femininity).

The Argentine tango is perhaps the last remnant (besides fly fishing) where man can boast that he is in control. There is an active movement in the Argentine tango society trying to change that. Anybody who has dance the tango know the man leads and that the woman (her job is much more difficult) has to be in a constant moment of unbalance where she must anticipate what the man will do but not entirely as she cannot lead. There is a tradition of men and women across a dance floor and how it is the man who indicates he may want to dance with her.

My proof of all of this is my new friend Guillermina Van Der Linden, who taught in an Amsterdam university until she visited Buenos Aires, fell in love with tango and stayed. She speaks several languages and dresses elegantly at all times. She has the presence of a woman who in other countries might make a successful entry into acting. Her partner José Carlos Romero Vedía makes a quiet foil for Van Der Linden’s sensual elegance. They dance and fit perfectly.

Imagine this man being able to easily lure the couple to pose for me in one of the ballrooms of our Hotel Claridge (a block away from where Van Der Linden and Romero Vedía dance every day on the corner of Florida and Lavalle.

My photographs were successful. But there was more. Romero Vedía offered to take some pictures of Van Der Linden with this photographer. I was thrilled!

I wonder how the folks in my now first world country of Canada and my city Vancouver opine of these Galaxy 5 photographs?

There is this curious fact. Vancouver might have E-scooters soon. They have been available in downtown Buenos Aires since last July.

In 1966/67 as a conscript sailor in the Argentine Navy in Buenos Aires I was an aide and translator for the Senior US Naval Advisor, Capt. USN Onofrio Salvia. I refused to carry an order (to show up very early to do some translations)) to an Argentine Lieutenant Commander. He told me that in a time of war I would have been shot or sent to Antarctica where the only females would have been penguins. I was given a week’s arrest in the brig. 

I had enough time to walk to Pygmalion Bookstore on Calle Corrientes (Borges patronized it) and purchased Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings (Faber and Faber- 1964) translated into English by Leif Sjöberg and W.H. Auden. In it I read:

He was a member of the crew on Columbus’ caravel – he kept wondering whether he would get back to his home village in time to succeed the old shoemaker before anybody else could grab the job.

Since then I have always tried to look ahead at possibilities and to take chances. I have looked back enough in 2019. This 2020 is one of many possibilities.

And if I am where I am today, in more or less pretty good health, and with no financial worries, it is all because my Rosemary never ever did look back.

Venecia 2019 with a Galaxy 5

As a photographer who earned his living in magazines and good newspapers my photographs had to properly exposed and in sharp focus. Before the era of Photoshop and scanners, photographers were commanded (with few exceptions) to shoot with colour slides (those larger than the 35mm format were called transparencies or trannies). It was only with slides that art directors could see a photographers original photos. Now it would be difficult to see with the availability of so many modifications to an original shot.

Good cameras had lenses that were very sharp. If a lens had a maximum aperture of (as an example F-2) the sharpest aperture was somewhere in the middle at around F-5.6. This was the camera version of a car’s cruising speed. One might suspect that at smaller apertures like F-16 or F-22 the results would be sharper. This is not so. The smaller apertures would have more depth of field but sharpness was to be had at that 5.6.

Magazine art director/designers demanded sharpness. If you used the tricks of those 70s and 80s to smear the edges of a filter with petroleum jelly to achieve a nice blend from sharp to unsharp for the face of a woman that was not 20 you would never get a job again. 

With the advent of digital cameras, photographers now are used to enhanced sharpness, detail and colourful colours (the term here is saturated colour). Some of these photographers are now feeling a nostalgia (not really theirs) for LP records and perhaps even four-on-the-floor VWs. So, good digital cameras have programs that mimic different kind of films (even Kodak B+W Infrared Film).

This is why the Lensbaby is so popular. This device attached to any digital camera can selectively make edges or other areas unsharp.

I used one of these in our 2019 trip to Venice, Florence and Siena. The lens has detachable circular inserts with varying sized f-stops.

When I started using it in Venice I dropped it. Something inside broke. Then when I looked through the viewfinder of my Fuji X-E1 (I used an X-E3 for normal sharp focused photographs) everything seemed to be not sharp. I was appalled. But I soldiered on anyway. Now almost a year later I am most pleased with the results. Why?

Fuji digital cameras have a little lever on the left of the viewfinder to adjust one’s personal diopter. It can be moved in a tight camera bag. I had forgotten this! The pictures in this series that I took in Venice are not bad. The blur that is not always in the centre where I wanted it is because of the internal breakage. My repair guru, Horst Wenzel says it cannot be repaired.

Going to a city where millions take their smart phones every year is the most photographed city in the world. It is possible to do justice to this city in a one week visit?  All I can say is that I tried. I used an iPhone3G without a SIM card, a Galaxy 5 phone, the X-E1 with the Lensbaby and the X-E3. Plus I took two 35mm swivel lens panoramic cameras, a Widelux and the Russian version, a Horizont. I loaded them with colour negative film and with Kodak b+w Infrared Film.

There are a few that I have come to like. 

 A few days ago my Rosemary and I watched Ulu Grosbard’s 1981 film True Confessions. My Wikipedia labels it an American neo-noir crime film. It stars Robert De Niro and Robert Duvall as the brothers Spellacy, a priest and police detective. It is adapted from the novel of the same name by John Gregory Dunne, loosely based on the Black Dahlia murder case of 1947. Dunne wrote the screenplay with his wife, novelist Joan Didion.

We enjoyed the complexity of this film that really is one of those buddy movies. Watching Robert Duval I could not but recollect that years ago when I was taking portraits of Willford Brimley, he told me that Duvall was picking up where Spencer Tracy had left off when he died.

Basilica della Santissima Annunziata - Florence 2019

But the film, since I was raised as a Roman Catholic and educated at a Catholic boarding school in Austin, Texas, St.Edward’s, showered me with moments of that past when life was as simple as telling yourself that if something was much too complex to fathom you just believed it on faith.

I was lucky enough to have had a teacher/mentor/friend, Brother Edwin Reggio,C.S.C. of the Congregation of Holy Cross who taught me religion via theology and philosophy. He taught me how to fend for myself with logic. It was a logic of acceptance through give and take and a smile.

The film also brought me visions of the unease I had to face as a teenager when I had the personal responsibility of making a confession (sometimes this Sacrament of Confession is called of Reconciliation). This unease I can strangely compare with Rosemary and I having had some loud spats (mostly from my side) in our first years in Vancouver so we decided to see some marriage councillors.  We had to iron out our problems by ourselves as we found ourselves making answers (ahead of time) that we would use for the questions asked!

In the same manner before going to confession while kneeling at a pew in preparation for the embarrassing ordeal (“Bless me father for I have sinned.”) I had to reconsider and figure out what my sins were and how I was going to frame them for the priest.

But after that ordeal, in those years of my youth, there was a pleasant levity (certainly not at all like St. Teresa of Ávila who was said sometimes floated at Holy Mass). I felt clean.

I sometime wonder what Freud or Jung may have written about the spiritual release of telling someone (not only your psychiatrist) of your troubles.

As someone who no longer goes to Mass and has not confessed for more than 50 years I suffer that Roman Catholic guilt that when things go well they may foreshadow some impending doom.

As a form of confession I find myself in this 2020 attempting to locate friends I may have offended.  I am ordering as well as I can my photographic output and do my best to criticize less and to praise more.

But I can still remember many of those confessions. I can understand why in the film The Two Popes much is made of the young Jorge Bergoglio going to confession at the St. Joseph Basilica in Flores, Buenos Aires. Francis had a spiritual awakening as a young man. 

The scene in the film is a marvellous parallel to all the confessional scenes of True Confessions. It is in one of those scenes that the Monsignor (De Niro and did he wear purple socks?) has his spiritual awakening and stops making the motions and becomes the man he was yet to be.

Venecia 2019 con un Lensbaby

El año pasado mi Rosemary y yo fuimos a Venecia. Hoy en día ir a un lugar tan popular dificulta la idea de catalogar una impresión diferente a la de las demás personas. Rosemary me persuadió a usar mi Galaxy 5 para tomar fotos además de usar mi mejor Fuji X-E3. Tomé como 30 (aquí seleccioné las mejores) fotos pero me desbordé en los museos de Florencia y Siena. No pude encontrar una versión en inglés del lindo ensayito que escribió Borges sobre Venecia. Hay en esa ciudad un laberinto dedicado a él que tomé con mi buena cámara.

Venecia

J.L.Borges

"Atlas" (1986)

Los peñascos, los ríos que tienen su cuna en las cumbres, la fusión de las aguas de esos ríos con las del Mar Adriático, los azares o las fatalidades de la historia y de la geología, la resaca, la arena, la formación gradual de las islas, la cercanía de Grecia, los peces, las migraciones de las gentes, las guerras de la Armórica y del Báltico, las cabañas de junco, las ramas entretejidas con barro, la inextricable red de canales, los primitivos lobos, las incursiones de los piratas dálmatas, la delicada terracota, las azoteas, el mármol, las caballadas y las lanzas de Atila, los pescadores defendidos por su pobreza, los lombardos, el hecho de ser uno de los puntos en que se encuentran el Occidente y el Oriente, los días y las noches de generaciones hoy olvidadas fueron los artífices. Recordemos también los anuales anillos de oro que el Dux dejaba caer desde la proa del Bucentauro y que, en la penumbra o tiniebla del agua, son los indefinidos eslabones de una cadena ideal en el tiempo. Sería aquí una injusticia olvidar al solícito buscador de los papeles de Aspern, a Dandolo, a Carpaccio, al Petrarca, a Shylock, a Byron, a Beppo, a Ruskin y a Marcel Proust. Altos en la memoria están los capitanes de bronce que invisiblemente se miran desde hace siglos, en los dos términos de una larga llanura.

Gibbon observa que la independencia de la antigua república de Venecia ha sido declarada por la espada y puede ser justificada por la pluma. Pascal escribe que los ríos son caminos que andan; los canales de Venecia son los caminos por los que andan las enlutadas góndolas que tienen algo de enlutados violines y que también recuerdan la música porque son melodiosas.

El laberinto de Borges en la isla de San Giorgio Maggiore en Venecia - Fotografía con la Fuji X-E3

Alguna vez escribí en un prólogo Venecia de cristal y crepúsculo. Crepúsculo y Venecia para mí son dos palabras casi sinónimas, pero nuestro crepúsculo ha perdido la luz y teme la noche y el de Venecia es un crepusculo delicado y eterno, sin antes ni después.

Claudio Ronco

Emanuela Vozza y Claudio Ronco

Claudo Ronco en el Ghetto