Monday, March 10, 2008



I have known Maddalena for 34 years. I have not seen her since she moved to Milan about 12 years ago. But we keep in touch via email. With my recent blogs on voluptuous Latin women and how I have almost been jealous when I read Edward Weston's Day Diary I have been thinking a lot about the Montreal born, Italian heritage Maddalena. I went into her files and found a treasure of photographs, some of which I can show here without offending potential youth who might accidentally discover this blog.



Maddalena first faced my camera in the late 70s when I was shooting photographs for Ron Langen's gay publication Bi-Line. Langen had the idea that I take two handsome young men and Maddalena to a forrest in Surrey in late November and photograph them nude as a trio in paradise before the fall of Adam.



The story was about two Adams and one snake, Maddalena. My subjects kept warm with a bottle of brandy and the pictures were a success. The photograph of Maddalena from the rear is one of the pictures (but cropped!).



For the next shoot we added one more woman, my friend Inga Vollmer and shot it inside an old railway parlour car that I got from my friend Harry Atterton. He was a PR man for Air Canada who happened to own a few railway cars on the side.



Through the years I photographed Maddalena lots. I would run into her at alternative band concerts at the Commodore and we would set dates to take pictures. With her and with the Reid sisters Virve and Julia I learned all I know now about the photography of the undraped female.



Unfortunately Maddalena left for Toronto about 16 or 17 years ago and the photography stopped. One year she came back and insisted I photograph the new hard bodied Maddalena wearing black lace gloves, etc. It wasn't exactly my cup of tea but I obliged. Maddalena never saw the results (the last three here are from that session) but with the ease of use that comes with a home scanner I am sure that today she will be looking at them from Milan.



Looking at her pictures I can see that I could have done a series on Mary Magdalene. I could have photographed a contemporary Mona Lisa. And there is more.

My friend Jim Christy has always been interested in Catholic saints. He has an extensive collection of images and statues. One of his favourites is one of the Holy Family in which Saint Joseph uncharacteristically places his hand on the Virgin Mary's shoulder.



Until recently the idea that Joseph would touch Mary was strictly verboten. In the last few years I have taken a few ethnic Virgin Mary's (fully undraped). I have a Vietnamese, a Chilean and an Argentine Mary. But Maddalena's interpretation of the Virgin Mary would make Mary a real woman. A real woman which I have no doubt Mary was.



Addendum March 10, 2008


Dear Alex, you did get a smile out of me. Quite amusing the association to Monalisa, the Virgin Mary and the not so virgin Mary Magdalen.
A series on Mary Magdalen or Monalisa would have been right up my ally.
I have only been in Milan for 7 years, although it feels like a lifetime, but I imagine it's at least 12 years since we last ran into each other in Toronto.
Been a while since i stood in front of a camera except for some self portraits along the way. I have attached a couple of self portraits I took 2 years ago. A contemporary interpretation of Mary Magdalen..... and a penitent Mary Magdalen.

Thank you Alex.

Madda

Last night I received a communication from A.K. Dewdney re my recent blog on a lecture I gave at the 2008 Northern Voice Conference at UBC. A.K. Dewdney writes:

Dear Alex,

You certainly have a point, but consider the plight of our Planiversal friends who find great (?) aesthetic fascination in one-dimensional images like this one:

....---.-..-..-----.- -..- -.- -...- -... .

the Mona Pizza (with apologies to Mr. Morse))

I don't think I have anything to add to your blog, except to say that the continual viewing of images on glowing screens has a debilitating effect on the brain, rendering it by degrees increasingly passive and decreasingly alert. The final stage is a form of benign idiocy.

All the best

Kee (Dewdney)
ps: The Dewdney Trail in BC commemorates Edgar Dewdney, one of the first governors-general of BC, I believe. My grandfather happened to take the same steamer to England with E. Dewdney back in the 20s. They could not find a common ancestor.

Sunday, March 09, 2008

A couple of weeks ago I photographed Kathleen Bartels, the Director of the Vancouver Art Gallery. It was a pleasant occasion and it all led me to think that I should renew my lapsed family membership to the gallery. This I did.




Yesterday Rebecca, Lauren, Rosemary and I visited the Vancouver Art Gallery. We only saw Truth Beauty - Pictorialism and the Photograph as Art, 1845-1945 because short and sweet visits to art galleries do not ruin a child's perception that a gallery can be fun. And fun it was. Rebecca was interested in many more of the photographs that I thought she would be.



Her favourite (one of mine ) was The Heart of the Storm, 1902 by American photographer Anne Brigman (right). Rebecca laughed and tried to stand on her head to look at Paul Lewis Anderson's Woman Boarding Double-Decker Bus, 1909 when I told her that Anderson's formula for a good photograph was its ability was to hold it upside down to see if the composition remained strong.



Lauren (5) was getting a bit ansy but I was able to show Rebecca Frederick H. Evans's F. Holland Day in Algerian Costume, 1901. F. Holland Day had just returned from a trip to Northern Africa. With friend and photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn they dressed up in Algerian clothes and rang Evan's doorbell. The housekeeper almost fainted but a unperturbed Evans invited the men in and took their portraits.



We finished our VAG visit with Rebecca's favourite chocolate brownie at the VAG's coffee shop. While there I waved at travel writer John Masters who makes the coffee shop his office when he is in Vancouver. I thought of all the ghosts that haunt the gallery for me. The Vancouver Art Gallery has litle content on the history or mantions any of the former gallery directors. I photographed all of them with the exception of Willard Holmes. I particularly enjoyed the affable J. Brooks Joyner and I remember the very silent and cold Luke Rombout whom I photographed in the late 70s at the 1145 West Georgia location of the VAG.



I don't rant in this blog but I do have a minor beef. The situation reminds me of the jealous pharaohs of Ancient Egypt who would rub out the cartouches of their predecessors and would thus have never ever existed. To find the correct spelling of Rombout I had to call former VAG director Abraham Rogatnick. To remember the first name (and the last, too) of former director Alf Bogusky (in the photograph with Michael Audain and curator Daina Augaitis) I had to call Malcolm Parry.



Only the Wikipedia entry for the VAG explained that the gallery building had been built by English architect Francis Rattenbury or that my picture of Arthur Erickson at the formal opening of the gallery had been taken in 1983. The VAG's excellent website will be even better when they add a history.



With Lauren a bit bored we walked to the Vancouver Public Library where we all had a pleasant time in the children's library. Rebecca insisted in bringing Howie Mandel (the narrator) Where Did I Come From? video which she watched with Rosemary and Lauren. I found it a bit on the shocking side particularly when the handsome (and married) couple stand up in the bathtub to reveal perfectly sharp (but as cartoons) and perfectly manicured (Brazilian wax jobs) pudenda. It was only later when Hilary (Rebecca and Lauren's mother) found out at the dinner table that Rebecca had allowed Lauren to watch that all hell broke loose. Rosemary's assertion that it had all gone over Lauren's head prevented our evening from being spoiled (Rebecca was not grounded) as we watched the other library video, the perfectly charming Handel's Last Chance where a little Irish beggar/thief boy saves and makes the Messiah a resounding success.

Ojos Que No Ven, Corazón Que No Siente

Saturday, March 08, 2008



The September 1980 Vancouver Magazine was unique in many ways. Art director Rick Staehling gave my cover photograph a treatment that is rare. He ran the picture with the first paragraph of the copy of the article by Judi Lees. It was a story about a woman who had been raped during a jogging run in Stanley Park.

Staehling had told me, "Go to Stanley Park with a model and photograph her running. Use a long lens to give the idea of someone staking her out and about to pounce." The cover was special for me because I did the opposite. I used an extreme wide angle lens, a 20 mm rectilinear lens and stood a mere four or five feet from my model as she jogged back and forth. I was very pleased with the results as was Staehling who I think would consider this cover one of his most memorable designs.



But there is another story behind this cover that is also interesting and I will not be able to provide all the fine details as reputations and feelings have to be respected.

For many years one of my favourite Vancouver musicians has been Stephen Drake. His brother Adam Drake is one of the strongest drummers the city has ever had particularly when he played with Art Bergmann. Brother Stephen was a master of the guitar and is currently a well respected music producer and technician.

The Drake's parents, Sally and Tom were early pioneers in the Vancouver film industry. They both wrote and write screenplays. One day I was having a chat with Tom who told me a strange story.

It seems that they were somehow friends of a jazz pianist who was having a need for a fix. It was somewhere in California near Los Angeles and the Drakes had to deliver him to a jazz festival. The pianist was adamant that he was not going anywhere until he got his methodone fix. But his papers were all screwed up so the Drakes drove from one methodone clinic to another trying to convince addicts to volunteer their methodone to help a pianist and they even offered money. But none of the drug addicts knew who Bill Evans was so it took a while before they scored a fix for Evans. By then the concert was about to begin and the highway was jammed with motorists going to it. Finally in desperation Drake stopped his car to plead with a policeman and explained the problem. The cop understood and inidicated to Drake that they should follow him. With sirens blaring Evans made his concert.

The curious fact is that the young woman in my picture was girlfriend to both Stephen Drake and Bill Evans.

Friday, March 07, 2008


Every once in a while I read the Daybooks of Edward Weston, particularly the one on Mexico and I am jealous at the descriptions of the women that posed for him in the roof of his Mexico City home. I long for those hot days of Mexico with the long shadows and I long for the women that Weston describes. They were earthy, women of a time before we tried to make them our equals and somehow failed in the process.



But in actual fact I should not feel at all jealous of Weston. I have "had" my women in the photographic sense and one of the best was South American born C Valparaiso. I photographed her while my Argentine artists friends Nora Patrich and Juan Manuel Sanchez sketched her. We had many sessions. Some were in my studio the others at the Patrich home. Few of those pictures can I show here. In particular I am fond of a series I did with C and her husband who played the wolf to C Little Red Riding Hood. In the sequence (alas you can only view two of them) the surprised Caperucita Roja turns the tables on the wolf and takes charge of the situation.



C and husband are back in South America and I long for them coming back. Perhaps I, too would start my Daybook and title it Vancouver II.



Addendum: An email from C on March 9, 2008

Hola!
Que alegría recibir al menos una línea de ti.
Claro q no me molesto. Al contrario, me alaga. Y ojalá más sesiones vengan pronto. Nosotros estamos esperando respuesta de la Embajada por la residencia.

Te mando un abrazo y muchos cariños

C

Thursday, March 06, 2008


In the 15 years I lived in Mexico I never bothered to find out who Vasco de Quiroga was. I thought he was some old Spanish priest involved in the conquest of Mexico and I left it at that.

Some 12 years ago I visited Mexico City and in a shopping mall in the San Angel Inn area of the city I ran into a most unlikely event. In the mall cinema they were having a festival of the films of German director Wim Wenders. His two angel films, Wings of Desire and Faraway, So Close! are favourites of mine. While I did not have time to catch a film I bought what is now one of my most prized T-shirts, one about Faraway, So Close! but in Spanish, Tan Lejos y Tan Cerca. Reflecting on the T-shirt (I wore it last week) I thought of a place that seems remote in time and location and yet is relatively close. I thought of Sointula and utopias. Let me explain.



Two years ago Rosemary, Rebecca and I went to the state of Michoacán in Mexico and the presence of Bishop Vasco de Quiroga was everywhere. I found out that this priest, who came to New Spain in 1530, somehow had read a copy of Thomas More's Utopia and seeing the plight of the Mexican Indians he decided to communize them. Vasco de Quiroga staked not only his reputation but his money in this project. His communes somehow survived into the 1850s.



When I returned to Vancouver I found the most delightful biography on Quiroga called Thomas More's Magician - A Novel Of Utopia In Mexico. Writer Toby Green follows the footsteps of Quiroga from his birthplace in Spain all the way to Mexico. The biography is a novel in that Green injects conversations that Quiroga may have had in this account that suddenly made our trip to Michoacán and the cities of Morelia, Pátzcuaro and Uruapan make all the sense in the world.



Looking back I remember two other indications of utopia. One was my visit to Thomas More's Chelsea Old Church in London where I photographed the reflections of gothic windows on an illustration of Thomas More that was on the wall. The other connection with utopia was an assignment in December 1994 to illustrate an essay by Taras Grescoe on the utopian Finnish settlement of Sointula on Malcolm Island, B.C. for the Georgia Straight. Photograph, above left is of the graveyard in Sointula.



The founder of the settlement in the beginning of the 19th century was Matti Kurrica (below). Like all utopias this one failed. Its failure was hastened by a terrible fire in 1903.



I look at my picture of the two youngsters, Finnish descendants Jess Willims and Alysha Turner on the 3:40 pm school ferry from Port MacNeil (in 1994 there was no high school in Sointula) and I wonder if they are still on the island or if they have left to search for utopia elsewhere.






Why did Sointula fail? Taras Grescoe, concludes his story with this:

In British Columbia, there has never been much middle ground, no countryside between wilderness and the city. As the frontier shifted westward across North America in the 19th century, the province seemed to be one of the few places left where the remaining territory was commensurate with man's capacity to imagine a completely different social order.


Kurrika's utopia failed - as did thousands of other communes across the continent - because his dreams had something in common with the clearcutting and strip-mining of the most ruthless venture capitalist: they turned the "wilderness" into an abstraction, transforming it into a terrain for ideologies, an enemy to conquer rather than an entity to learn from. Utopia has always been the fragile, pastoral dream of city dwellers. As a site for transforming human nature, it demands a denatured environment. But utopia has a flip side: it is the blank space that appears on the map whenever an equals sign is scrawled between the words "resources" and "nature".


Unlike B.C.'s idealistic utopias this dystopia thrives by creating barren land.



Left a view of Malcolm Island and right, Mauno Ahola, a son of one of the original settlers.


Addendum, February 24, 2008

name: Nicole Laughlin

comments: Every now and then I like to return home and to do
that from Abbotsford it is always easiest to do so by
logging on to the net and typing in Sointula and
waiting to see what loads up. This is how I came to
your site. I am actually Jess' and Alyshas' cousin and
when I read your comment on wondering if they were
still on the Island I thought I would drop a line to
say... no, both have moved away and both now have
families of their own but no matter what, no matter
where you live... home is always Sointula and you
are drawn back for holidays and summer vacations.
Nikki

Wednesday, March 05, 2008

A, S and M are the three most interesting and fascinating sisters in Vancouver. I know all three and I have photographed A and S. After much consideration and without disrespect to the glamourous and sexy A, the ethereal and graceful S I think that I would consider M the most interesting as her charms and talents are hidden beneath tailored suits and a lawyer's demeanor.



When S (the youngest of the three) approached me for photographs some years ago she was a model who had just returned from Europe. I have never considered myself a fashion photographer but I gave it a try. S, If I remember well said, "I don't mean disrespect to your photography but I really did not like any of the pictures you took of me." And that was the end of that. I looked at them today and I find that some do charm me. The last picture is one of S making up her sister A in my studio for a shoot that was a bit more recent, October 2002.



S is involved in town in many art projects.

Tuesday, March 04, 2008


When I first came to Vancouver from Mexico some 38 years ago my knowledge of Canada was limited to having seen the totem pole in Retiro Station in Buenos Aires and the one in Chapultepec Park in Mexico City. From my New Dublin, Ontario wife Rosemary I knew all about an exciting man called Pierre Trudeau. According to her the most beautiful city in Canada was Quebec City. She didn't think I could cope with the snow in those parts so we (she) decided on Vancouver for our family.

I was soon made welcome by the CBC in that my first job as a photographer was there. In that first year in Canada I had been a counter agent for Tilden Rent-Car on Alberni Street. Interesting men with longish hair and or beards came to rent blue Ford station wagons. They said they were from the CBC. They would rent them for months and money seemed to be no problem. They would stuff the wagons with all kinds of sound and TV camera equipment. I wanted a piece of that action so I made my enquiries and finally landed a job taking station ID slides for the new French TV station. From there I crossed that border that still seems to exist at the CBC from the French side to the English side. Through the years I have made lasting friends and I have been proud of whatever I did there. I am particularly thankful for having learned a lot about Canada by listening to CBC Radio or watching (not so much now as I watch very little TV) CBC TV. I was a fan of Wayne & Shuster. One of the most thrilling moments of my life was when cameraman Mike Varga took me to the trailer outside the Coliseum where a man directed all the cameras of Hockey Night In Canada. He sat in front of multiple screens and directed the show. In many ways I almost feel like I have always lived in Canada. The CBC helped me feel at home.

Part of it came from meeting the people of the CBC. I remember one day when I was driving down town and I was listening to Bob Kerr's program Off The Record. He was playing a version of Sergei Rachmaninoff's Vocalise. It featured many cellos. I stopped the car. Kerr said, "That was Rachmaninoff's Vocalise played by the Yale Cellos with Aldo Parisot conductor." I wrote it all down madly. I parked my car in a back alley (I had and have municipal plates) and bought the record at A&B Sound. I was thrilled to meet and photograph Kerr in his studio. I loved his fussy ways and his attention to detail.



I first met Jurgen Gothe in 1985 when he had just started with Disc Drive. We were in a train going to Whistler, I believe. He entertained me going and coming. I was charmed. I have been lucky to photograph him many times through the years. I have photographed him at home and met his wife and his dog. I have seen his CD collection. Gothe's address is...

I understand that his show is going to end in September. While I don't listen to him every day it is comforting to know he is there and that when I switch him on I will hear a voice with no speech impediment, lisp or mannerism. I will listen to intelligence and good English. This is rare in radio today.

For a long time I suffered a bit (but I liked the music he played and in particular the live concerts he hosted) listening to Eric Friesen. He has an attractive booming voice and perfect diction. Unfortunately he sounds a bit too serious sometimes. I remember listening to one of his former In Performance broadcasts and he was talking to a female string quartet backstage. Friesen made the mistake of asking one of them what it was like in the dressing room. The woman answered that they didn't wear much. Friesen stammered, uncharacteristically he had lost his cool! At that point I understood and began to appreciate the man and I have been a fan since. He came to Vancouver to MC a show and I met him. He did not look at all like the stuffed shirt I pictured him to be. He was tall, blonde and handsome and charming in a quiet way. I will miss him when he departs on December 31st. His "seriousness" had me fooled for a while.

CBC, here is a hint. Show the faces of those radio people more often. We will grow to like them even more.

The above photograph of Gothe ran in the Georgia Straight on March 18, 1999. Gothe wrote about his almost lifelong obsession with wine. His little essay is exactly like his radio show. It relaxes you. The world is just fine and here a sample:



...The best wine ever? I hope I haven't had it yet. The worst? Something pale and pink, made from nectarines, in a non-wine friendly area of Oregon.

And when the wine's all gone? Green tea, Red Zinger, expresso, a shot of cognac, some Aqua Libra, lots of bubbly water. And so to bed.

Once, I was driving over a mountain pass in Montana and stopped for lunch in a tiny town. Main-street bar, limited lunch menu, smell of grease, George Jones on the jukebox. I ordered the burger'n'fries and then asked - it is an obsession - "Have you got any wine?"

She said: "Yeah, but it ain't open."

So all's not all that bad in the world.