Monday, July 07, 2008



Last year I attended the popular Vancouver intitution of dance, Brief Encounters. I was charmed by the performance of the intriguing Delia Brett who partnered with a puppeteer. A the intermission I saw Brett with a little boy in tow. They were identical and charming. He looked like a little adult, and adult with poise and grace.

Artemis Gordon, dance director of Arts Umbrella on Granville Island, considers dance skill to be important but it must be balanced by presence. After having seen Brett dance I agree with Gordon. Brett has presence in spades.

Brett decided to dance when she was 20. After seeing Dancemakers, a Toronto contemporary dance company, she quit her pursuit of film and TV and chose Peter Bingham's a contact improvisational dance method at EDAM. After my photo session with her and her seven-year-old son, Beckett I asked Brett: Why contact?

"It uses the whole person to develop artistry, imagination and awareness with physcial principles. It is flying because you are free. You develop greater levels of trust in yourself and others." Brett then went to shower praise on Bingham, one of Vancouver's little-known gurus of dance excellence. "He has been a huge influence in my life. EDAM [Experimental Dance and Music] is a place where I feel I belong. There I feel a sense of completeness."

I asked Brett what it was like to be a dancer and a mom. "It's good, but it's hard to be poor and to be a mother. Dance has given me the power and strength I never knew I had before I had Beckett. It is a different perspective in a way that I don't think you could get by just being an artist on the margins of society. It is a bigger world because I am a mother."

Brett and dance partner Daelik (both directors of Machinenoisy performed Vancouver vs Vancouver in collaboration with choreographer Fabrice Ramalingon in Sete, France May 30 and in Thessaloniki, Greece June 14. Perhaps we will see this performance (about the lively and sometimes pugilistic Vancouver dance scene) here soon.

As for Beckett, when I asked him if he planned to be a dancer, he looked me straight in the eye and groaned, "Uh-uh."


© 2008 VLM/Alex Waterhouse-Hayward

Sunday, July 06, 2008


Sometime at the end of the 50s my uncle, who at the time was in Egypt, proposed to my mother that I attend the University of Alexandria. I remember going with her to the P&O representative in Mexico City to inquire about ticket prices. I was to go in the Oriana. But this strange dream of my uncle's was for naught as Nasser suddenly banned the use of English from the curriculum. I never made it to Alexandria.



I have never been to Egypt and much less explored the stacks of the library in Alexandria. But there has been a small measure of ancillary pleasure involved in my pursuit of another Alexandria. Alexandria posed for my camera for several years. She was the perfect model, uncomplicated in that she was always available for pictures. She was pleasant and as my friend Juan Manuel Sanchez was fond of saying of such a woman , "muy plástica" which is his Argentine way of describing a body that is flexible and moldable to his style.



With Alexandria (considering that the two previous posts feature photographs of women on their backs and upside down) I finally nailed down a favourite cliché which unfortunately I cannot show here as the pictures have to have a modicum of decency. In these photographs I posed Alexandria upside down with cigarette in mouth and with sunlight streaming in through a Venetian blind, projecting zig zag marks on her undraped body. With Alexandria I tested all kinds of lighting techniques, lenses and film stocks.



Many of the pictures that I took of her never saw the light of day because of the expense of making prints from slides. I rarely shot 35mm slides but in one occasion I photographed Alexandria in her apartment with a Kodak transparency film in 35mm format that had an ISO (ASA) rating of 800 but could be nicely pushed to 1600. The results had contrast and grain. With the advent of my scanner I am now able to put them here with ease.



I am too old to take some of the photographs that can only be taken with the latest technology. Not because I could not master the technology but more so because of that gold card in my pocket. Read further to find out why.

Years back I affixed a Nikon FM-2 to the hub of a cyclist's front wheel and threaded the wire of the motor drive to his right hand so that he could take pictures as he pedaled. I would like to see the same principle made easier by strapping cheap digital point and shoots to skateboards and snowboards. I have always rejected the shooting of pornography and gotten very close to doing it. I have always recoiled in the end as good taste prevailed. But the idea of strapping a point and shoot to one's forehead and... I need not go any further. You can imagine the impact of capturing (to use this new term that has replaced take or expose) the frenzy and intimacy of such physical closeness.



In some way when I looked at Alexandria's slides which I took with the fast slide film I am shocked to find a level of intimacy that I did not see then. Being behind my camera can do that.



It protects you by distancing you. I did not see then what I see here now. In most the clothes are on but the darkness and the stark colours seem to ooze with eroticism.

Saturday, July 05, 2008


In late 1989 Art Bergmann and I went to the Number 5 Orange for a beer after having seen one of the worst films we had ever seen in our lives. We had gone to a pre-screening of  Flesh Gordon Meets the Cosmic Cheerleaders. We had a mutual friend Michael Metcalf who was a PA and had a bit part playing a real turd. His character's name was Chief Diareah. To get rid of him and his evil associates, Bill and Mary Turd and Little Poop they were fed Exlax.

We quickly ran out of money and when our sassy, but attractive waitress, asked us if we wanted more beer I told her we had no more money.

She was wearing a white dress with black polka dots that was tight in the right places. The sight of her reminded me of the most erotic scene in films. In John Huston's 1961 The Misfits Marilyn Monroe walks into a cowboy bar and grabs a man's paddle ball and plays it expertly as all the men go wild and count, "35, 35, 36,..." and she does not miss. The polka dots resembled the physics experiment where you draw dots on a balloon and then blow it large. The polka dots had a life all their own. So did Kelly's (our waitress).

With a sneer she asked us, "Go into your pockets and bring out what you've got." We pulled out quarters, dimes and nickles. Triumphantly she picked it all up and said, "Just enough for a pint. You boys can share it," and plunked it in the middle of our table.

I did get Kelly to come to my studio and pose for me in her polka dot dress. At the time, 1990 I was obsessed with the idea of taking pictures of women with them upside down and hanging from my studio couch (a $100 bargain from a retiring psychiatrist who even included the delivery for the price.)

I believe that the truly sophisticated would never think of turning such a picture in the other direction! Pictures that are taken upside down should be seen that way. This blog post shares a similarity with the previous one in that both feature a woman lying on her back and photographed upside down. But there is also a difference. While I met only two Tanyas I did meet four Kellys in all.

Kelly Tough

Kelly Brock

Kelly Wood

Friday, July 04, 2008


I met two Tanyas in my life and both were voluptuously beautiful. The first, was called Tanya do Nascimento and I met her one evening in Santos Brazil in 1966.

The second Tanya was Tanya Blake and she posed for me in my studio and then in room 615 of the Marble Arch around 1988. The second Tanya suffered through my photographic uncertainty and a lack of purpose. How was I suppose to photograph a beautiful woman in a cheap hotel room? I was experimenting with glamour lighting. My guess is that if she suffered fools she did so silently and through her I eventually found my way.

I knew the first Tanya even less. The two young officers of the ELMA (Empresa Lineas Maritimas Argentinas) motor vessel Rio Aguapey had gone on shore leave when their ship docked to load coffee beans and machinery in the Brazilian port of Santos. I was the only passenger so I was invited to go along. We three were Argentines and thought ourselves superior to all Brazilians. We felt we were better at futbol, in sailing ships and in the conquest of women. We went to a cafe. We were soon joined by three delightful and beautiful women. The most forward of them was my first Tanya. We three looked at each other and simultaneously thought, "We are so handsome and manly that we are getting the pick of the lot." Tanya went into her handbag and produced what looked like a solid gold cigarette case. She opened it and offered us what I immediately recognized as pastel coloured , Balkan Sobranies made to order. My two officer friends were in their glory. The three ladies suggested we go dancing at a nearby cabaret. We arrived and we compared notes on our money situation. We were going to order rum. Rum is cheap in Brazil. The ladies ordered Scotch. At that point I told the two smiling officers, "We have been had, let's go before we lose all our money."



As we left we decided that Brazilian men were more worthy of our respect.

Thursday, July 03, 2008


I first met Malcolm Parry, editor of Vancouver Magazine sometime in 1977 when the office was on 1008 Hornby Street. His office, on the second floor, was the largest. It was on the North West corner of the building. Looking west Mac would pick up a monocular and look into the rooms of the Century Plaza on Burrard. Sometimes he would just play a bent soprano saxophone. Looking west was a messy scene that one day was transformed when I watched James La Bounty photograph a good looking architect in a trench coat. The messy scene behind him became the Law Courts and Robson Square and the architect was Arthur Erkikson.



But later in the 70s the magazine moved to 1205 Richards corner with Davie. Across the street facing East was an industrial laundry works. The building was gleeming white. I believe that corner now houses a Choices and large condo.



Ten zero eight Hornby Street was famous for the monthly "pissups". They happened a few days after the magazine made it to the newstands. Contributors (writers, photographers and illustrators) would show up and the magazine would provide cheap vino verde, cheap beer and munchies (terrible munchies). It was here that I met writers who became better known later. Max Wyman, Ben Metcalf, Bob Hunter, Garry Marchant and a young Les Wiseman are examples.



Twelve Zero Five Richards was famous for more parties. It was here that I saw my first alcoholic punch fountain and came to understand that the Christmas issue Playboy cartoons of office orgy parties were not all that off the mark. In one memorable occasion Mac went out to the street (in the early 80s prostitutes worked the area) and invited several ladies of the night to the festivities. I distinctly remember jumping into Mac's WV camper to go to La Bodega. One of my friends was holding hands with a prostitute. At la bodega he was sitting to my right and a another friend to my left. I told the friend on my left, "He is holding hands with her but he is much too drunk to realize that she is a man. Should I tell him?" His answer was short, "No, it's none of your business."


On Friday afternoons often some of the freelance writers would show up with beer. Sometimes this also happened on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. When Garry Marchant, the travel writer affectionately called the Gaz, visited, his pal Les Wiseman, we would go to the Blackstone (on Granville and Davie) to buy beer (it was the cheapest place). If the day was sunny the beer party would move up to the roof. On this particular day (see photographs) the party had begun at the Cecil Hotel and Wiseman and Marchant had brought back a couple of the dancers back to the magazine. Tiffany is wearing a striped top that sort of hides her extra special measurements. I had a weakness for her mouth since it reminded me of Leslie Caron's. The other dancer (who under the influence of beer did not seem to be afraid of heights and somehow could maintain her balance) is Ruby. She was friendly and efficient when she danced and Les one day told me, "She is so pleasant and nice but I think she is fated for tragedy." Perhaps he was right but we will never know. I never heard from her again. Only a week ago I was invited to a birthday party (Tiffany's) in Mapleridge where I would have met her husband and children. But I did not want to go. I did not want to tamper with my memories of that day. As we went up to the roof I took a quick picture of Mac in his office with a woman I cannot identify.


In these pictures you can see Richards street, which runs north/south. Marchant is wearing the darker shirt, Wiseman has the beard and the then brand new art director, Chris Dahl is the man in the light shirt. And that's me in the dark sunglasses.

Addendum:

Chantal Somebody. French name. From Quebec. One our advertising sales
representatives. Location is an advertising sales office.

Mac

Wednesday, July 02, 2008


Rebecca came back from Toronto today at 10am. I had to find a reason to go and see her. My Rosemary (very Canadian) said, "She is probably too tired. We should let her be." Why must Canadians be so correct, so thoughtful and so right? And why is it that just in a situation like this can they not be just a little bit daring?

I mixed a bucket with well aged steer manure and a few handfuls of alfalfa meal mixed with a touch of epson salts (magnesium sulphate) and suggested to Rosemary that we go to Rebecca's. We did. Rebecca and I mixed in the stuff into her roses and then watered them. The manure will do its thing. The epson salts will make the plants digest the manure more easily and the alfalfa meal will promote healthy new shoots which will become next year's canes. I lent Rebecca my secateurs and warned her to be careful as she deadheaded her plants.

Rebecca's beautiful curly hair had been made straight by her Toronto aunt and she had lots of makeup. She looked lovely. After a week she looked a year older. Rosemary commented, "Why must you grow up, Rebecca?"

The secret is that both her mother (Hilary) and her father (Bruce) have already seen the latest Harrison Ford film. "Let's all go to see it I said." Hilary looked at me and said, "Yes let's all go, but if you want to take her Papi you may."

Yes!

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

White is not my favourite colour. Perhaps it has all to do with having had to dress in sailor whites for two long summer/springs in Buenos Aires. I had to look crisp and clean all the time. When I took the train or bus I never sat down. Buenos Aires car pollution not to mention that from the Mercedes Benz diesel buses added to the seat grime. Luckily the blue sailor collar prevented ring around the collar. I swore that if I ever survived the ordeal I would never wear bell bottoms, white pants or white shirts. During the late 60s I must admit I wore a few semi-bell bottoms. But none were white. In photography, white shirts and dresses are a problem particularly when the resulting photograph will be reproduced in a newspaper or a magazine with lower reproduction standards. White shirts and a caucasian man's white face don't mix well and look terrible in newsprint. I invariably ask the businessmen and lawyers that I photograph to wear blue shirts. I ask the women to try not to wear white bloused but I do recommend pearls. Pearls will make the toughest female lawyer look approchable and femenine. In my garden I have several white roses. I have Rosa 'Fair Bianca', Rosa 'Blanc double de Coubert', Rosa 'Splendens', Rosa 'Mme Alfred Carriere', Rosa 'Gruss an Aachen' and the lovely one seen here Rosa 'Margaret Merril'. She is not an old rose but a 1978 Harkness floribunda with a very sweet smell. I have purchased three and two have died in the same spot that I insist on planting her (not very sunny). I thought I had finally lost her but today she appeared with this one bloom. I gave gotten the message and in the fall I will move her to a sunny location. When I first saw her today I remembered many years ago (at least 32) when I had gone to the Mayan ruins of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico. I had spent a whole day in stifling humid heat and was attacked by mosquitoes which I kept almost at bay by constantly smoking some Flor de La Costa cigars from Veracruz. That evening I had stayed at a cheap hotel. I asked the man at the front desk to wake me up in the morning so I could take the bus to Villahermosa and not miss my Mexicana plane. The man told me he could not assure me that he would wake me up as he had nobody to wake him up. I had a wrist alarm watch but I did not trust it. I kept awake all night and took my third class bus with chickens, pigs, turkeys and native Mexicans that reeked of smoke and sweat. The bus had something like 10 forward gears. Every time it stopped to pick up a passenger (and this happened so many times I was in fear of missing my flight). Then the driver would engage all those forward gears until he reached some sort of cruising speed. I finally arrived at the airport with a few minutes to spare. I was soothed and refreshed by the sight of the all white Mexicana de Aviacíon Boeing 727. I have never been so happy to see white. Almost as happy as I was today to see Margaret Merril.