Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Jennifer Montgomery

These two women, one an American film director, the other a German actress are linked in my photo files by the positive and the negative. I photographed them both in the 90s in the Sun Room of the Hotel Vancouver. Both came for the Vancouver Film Festival. There the similarities end. I was struck by the intensity of Barbara Sukowa who was in town to promote Lars Van Trier's Europa. It was difficult to hold her gaze. Behind the protection of my camera I asked her to look into it and, "seduce me." This she did.

Jennifer Montgomery had been seduced, when she was 14, by Jock Sturges, photography/art teacher, at a private boarding school. Years later the FBI wanted to nail Sturges for child pornography and attempted to coerce and intimidate Montgomery to testify. Montgomery refused even though the FBI went to terrible lengths, even as far as blackmailing her with the threat of publishing the nude photos that Sturges had taken of her. Montgomery prevailed and Sturges was off the hook. But years later, in 1995, Montgomery with her avant-garde film Art for Teachers of Children got even. In the film, the actor who plays Sturges, tells his young model to show more energy (plus more of those banalities that we photographers shower our subjects with). This results in the actress playing Montgomery to take off her shirt. With Montgomery facing my camera I was speechless.

Art for Teachers of Children

Tuesday, March 28, 2006



Vancouver Sun journalist Malcolm Parry calls it the privileged position. If you are looking up at a tall building you are not in that situation. You have to be above and looking down. Another aspect of the privileged position is access. Access to celebrities has become doubly difficult since 9/11. The rock band The Police were the first to establish restrictions on when they could be photographed during a performance and they demanded that photographers sign contracts which prohibited most of the lucrative uses of the photographs. When I took these of the Police my access was incredible but I had to sign a contract that did not allow me to use any of them for T shirts!

I have always loved this photograph of Sarah McLachlan and her husband Ashwin Sood. I took it at Sarah's old house and there were no handlers around. Only the Straight writer, Alex Varty was there. I cannot imagine being able to take a picture like this now.

Monday, March 27, 2006



When I first met Bif Naked it must have been about 10 years ago. She sang in town with a band that could not compete with her stage presence. The last time I saw her she was driving (a poodle in one hand, the steering wheel in the other) a Jaguar with darkened windows.

I took some photographs of her in one of the rooms of the Marble Arch and also in my studio. I remember one time when Bif and I were having a drink in the Marble Arch bar. She was wearing a muscle shirt. Tony Ricci, the then owner of the Marble Arch, came over and I introduced them to each other. After Bif left, Tony asked me, "Who was that woman with the big...?" I was astounded. How could Tony have missed all those tattoos? Bif has always tried to act tough. The fact is that for this photo, when she placed her hand on her head, I asked her if she had ever taken ballet. She answered, "Yeah, for 6 months. Why, does it show?"

Sunday, March 26, 2006



My Manila-born mother, Filomena de Irureta Goyena Hayward, could do anything. She played the piano, taught physics and chemistry, she gardened, danced the tango and could swim on her back effortlessly without a trace of a ripple on the water. She could not cook. In 1971 she returned to Mexico from North Carolina from visiting my uncle Antonio de Irureta Goyena armed with Marion Brown's Southern Cook Book. She lived with us at our little house in the outskirts of Mexico City in Arboledas, Estado de México. Nena proceded to dazzle us with her cooking. Our favourite was Adalyn Lindley's Chicken A La Barbara (Neiman-Marcus Tea Room, Dallas).

Today Rosemary decided to make Chicken A La Barbara. Returning from Rebecca's early morning ballet class on Granville Island, her sister Lauren Elizabeth (3½)giggled at the name when I told her of our lunch menu. But when she saw the platter on the table she indicated to us that she was not going to eat any of it. After lunch I commanded Lauren to stay at the table until she had three spoonfuls. She was not to go to the garden to play until she did so. Lauren, unlike her sister Rebecca, is not subject to the persuasion of logic. Since I was an only child I have never understood what it's like to be a second banana and I may have made all kinds of mistakes with her mother Hilary, who was second banana to our older daughter Ale. I will never comprehend the bond between brothers or sisters. With my recently discovered half brother I cannot accept the sharing of a father and I speak of my father not as "our" father but of George. It seems safer. After staring at her plate for an hour, Lauren told me she was ready to eat one spoonful and no more. I knew I was defeated. Soon she was out playing.

Saturday, March 25, 2006



In 1966 I received a call from my uncle Leo Mahdjoubian. He was an Armenian who had fought with the Black Watch in WW-I and had moved to Argentina after the war. He stayed at a pensión run by my grandmother Ellen Carter and soon was part of the family. Uncle Leo told me, "Your old man George has kicked the bucket. He died on the street and was taken to the Hospital Pirovano by a police sargeant. You have to go to the police station to sign a document." He told me he was sorry and rang off.



 At the police station the desk sargeant told me that there was some sort of mistake as my father's son had already been there and signed the papers. That's how I found out I had a half brother. I met Enrique the next day. I have no idea to this day how he was able to find my phone number, why it was Uncle Leo who called me in the first place, and how Enrique had learned of George's death. When I met Enrique, who spoke no English, I was struck by his resemblance to my father. He had the same blue eyes. Enrique was about 12 years older than I was. I met a couple of Enrique's sons. His sons looked more like my father than I did. Enrique offered to help pay George's funeral. With my $1.00 US Dollar monthly pay as an Argentine Navy conscript I was going to need need some help. I turned Enrique down. The sargeant, who had taken my father to the hospital, had called me. At a corner boliche (cafe) he placed in my hand a sum of money that subsequently paid for a modest funeral. The sargeant had removed all of my father's posessions from his pocket saying that in the hospital they would have disappeared. He told me he had known my father. My father (above, left) had been working to save up money to bribe a general to get me out of the service so I could go home to Mexico. This was the money he had found in my father's pocket.

Years later, in 1989, Enrique (right), his son Patricio (left) and I sat for coffee at La Biela. Patricio took out a small stone from his pocket and threw it in my direction. "I went to George's grave at Chacarita Cemetery. He's not there anymore. A Mrs. Gomez is buried there. It seems you didn't pay for perpetuity. Maybe this stone was close to his bones before they threw them away."

My mother, who was a beautiful swimmer learned to dance the tango with my father. Enrique's mother told me that she was not aware that my father had ever danced the tango, "George was an excellent swimmer and he taught me how to swim."

Friday, March 24, 2006


The Retiro train station in Buenos Aires could be anywhere in London if it weren't for the Argentine Spanish you would hear on the platforms waiting for the train to Coghlan where I lived as a boy. My uncle Freddy Hayward, who was born in Buenos Aires and worked for Glaxo, went back "home" to England every few years. He always wore his St. Andrew's Scots School blazer when I was invited for tea. I liked to go because Aunt Iris made the best deviled ham in the world and both Uncle Freddy and I would smoke our Bewlay pipes (filled with Galloway's Three Nuns) after tea. Recently when I went to Buenos Aires in November 2004 with Rosemary and our granddaughter Rebecca I told Rebecca that my first cousin and godmother, Inesita O'Reilly Kuker spoke like the Queen of England. Strictly speaking it is the other way around as Inesita is 83 and so is older. Some years before, her husband Dolfi Kuker (who introduced me to the unique Argentine white wine made from torrontés grapes) took me on a tour of patrician Buenos Aires which included lunch at the venerable Jockey Club. As a young man I had spent weekends in the Paraná River delta called El Tigre. Each ethnic community had its own rowing club and I would lust after the women rowers with my friend John Sullivan (he was a conscript in the Argentine Army while I was in the Argentine Navy) who had a small bungalow on one of the thousands of little islands of the delta. We would identify the red, white and green stripes on the tips of the oars as those from the Italian Rowing Club while the red, black and white were the Germans. But our favourites where the English ladies who rowed with white and blue striped oars of the Buenos Aires Rowing Club. Alas! When Dolfi Kuker took me to their club house all we found were these handsome young men.

Thursday, March 23, 2006


This is one of those lucky photographs that just happens. I took it in Veracruz in 1968. It was the "norte" season so the wind was blowing on the seaside promenade called the malecón. I had married Rosemary a year before in Coyoacán, Mexico but I courted her in Veracruz where my mother lived on Pinzón Street. I have a feeling that our first daughter Alexandra Elizabeth may have been conceived in what really is one of the oldest cities of the New World. It somehow feels inevitable that Rosemary and I will return. I often wonder what it would have been like to have been around when the Three Times Heroic City of Veracruz (in one of the three incidents pirate Henry Morgan raped and pillaged it) witnessed the landing of the American army during the Mexican American War. There was a young captain in the US Army who, with his genius, managed to organize things so that Veracruz fell without much bloodshed. The young Captain was Robert E. Lee.


Gone for Soldiers