Thursday, May 07, 2009



There are many reasons why I am posting pictures of Sylvie Desroches today. There is even a good reason why I posting two similar pictures of Sylvie Desroches today.

I have photographed my daughters all these years with some regularity. But there was a period when I was uncertain. This was when Hilary was 12 and Ale was 15. I told Rosemary, “I think I am going to ask photographer James La Bounty to photograph our daughters.” “Why?” she asked me and continued, “He is going to be expensive and you are a photographer. What for?" I told her that as their father I would see them as little girls for some time to come, and La Bounty, not being related to the girls would be objective and see them as girls approaching womanhood. He would photograph them as such. Rosemary hated the pictures that La Bounty took. It would seem that she was not prepared, also, to see her girls grown up. After a couple of years Rosemary began to tolerate the pictures that were on our living room wall and a bit later she even told me she liked them. Since then the pictures have been put in storage. That moment of uncertainty between girl and woman is gone. Ale is 40 and Hilary is 37.

But now it is about to return as our Rebecca, Hilary's older daughter, will soon be 12. Next year she is going to Quebec on a school student exchange. And a year later a Quebec girl will stay with Rebecca.

It was when Hilary was 16 that her exchange student came to Vancouver to stay with us. Sylvie Desroches was a lively and sophisticated young girl. At the time I was crazy about classic Hollywood lighting so I asked her if she would pose for me on our living room sofa. I have never really made up my mind if exposure 7 or exposure 8 is the better portrait of a 16 year-old going on 20. So I am posting both here.


I wonder if Hilary has made any effort to find Sylvie. Perhaps she will become curious when Rebecca travels next year.

And when Rebecca is around 15 how will I photograph her? I am not her father. But as her grandfather will I still see her as a little girl? Or will I see the woman she is bound to become by then? Just another big reason to want to be alive.

Addendum: Rosemary reminded me of a few facts I had forgotten. Hilary and Rebecca, when Rebecca was 3, went to Quebec City to visit Sylvie. She was divorced and had a daughter called Margarite. Sylvie had a new boyfriend that she adored. Sylvie's mother was very kind to Rebecca but they could not communicate because they had no language in common. Rebecca called to inform me that Sylvie now lives in Alberta.

Wednesday, May 06, 2009





I first met Barbara Rycroft in 1983. It was at the cavernous convention room of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas. The women dancing on stage were being judged by Tempest Storm. I was taking pictures for McLeans and the Vancouver Province. The women on stage weren’t wearing much. Offstage, Rycroft, dressed to kill, was wearing beautiful slacks, a top with décolletage that would have made the girls on stage blush, and high heel shoes. With kid gloves she was cradling the latest Nikon of the time. Not even all of the Three Graces could have surpassed her style and poise. I felt embarrassed holding my mundane Pentax Spotmatic Fs.



When Barbara Rycroft oozed femininity and sheer elegant sexuality, sexy cars were Pontiacs. Alas we will soon have no more Pontiacs and women like Barbara Hycroft are almost extinct. But the memories remain and somehow that’s comforting.

Tuesday, May 05, 2009



"Manly yes, but I like it too" Irish Spring soap commercial 1970s



At about this time, every year I call up the only other person that I know in Vancouver who shares my love and excitement for the Genus Hosta. Donald Hodgson is a retired school teacher who lives in North Vancouver. He has a backyard wholesale hosta business and he grows only the best of the proven hostas that once established will delight the eye for years during the growing season and come back like clockwork every spring. It was at about this time that Donald Hodgson would say, “I love them now when they are emerging from the ground, the leaves are unfurling and they are pristine. My heart aches at their perfection."

Alas Hodgson, my friend died last year. One of the worst moments of my life happened when his widow Joan called me up to pass by her house and pick some plants. Hodgson was gone and there I was walking on his garden picking plants with a ghost in tow. It was sad yet in some way I felt that by taking some of his plants he would somehow live on in my garden. So many of the best hostas in my garden had already traveled from his garden to mine through the years. Every year he would visit and we would look at each individual plant (I have around 400 of them!) and discuss its merits.



I miss Donald Hodgson. I miss the man with whom I shared my passion for hostas.



Here are four leaves looking as pristine as Hodgson would Imagine. The bluish one is Hosta ‘Halcyon’. In a month it will become even bluer. In late June Halcyon has many very showy mauve flowers. The variegated leaf is from Hosta ‘Whirlwind’. It is extremely easy to grow in spite of its bold elegance. The third leaf is a “gold” Hosta ‘Marilyn’. She is albescent. This means that as the season progresses the leaves will fade to almost white. The last greenish leaf is simply the underside of Halcyon. If I had to pick the one hosta in my garden that is my steady favourite it would have to be this one.



"Fresh and clean as a whistle."
Irish Spring soap commercial 1970s

Monday, May 04, 2009


Since Rebecca started taking ballet and dance lessons at the Arts Umbrella in 2004 I have watched the older girls and boys in other classes grow from one year to another. Then in May 2007 I convinced Editor Bob Mercer to run a piece in his magazine, VLM called The Manly Art of Ballet. I wrote of the extraordinary boys who were part of the Arts Umbrella dance program. Around October 2008 I again convinced Bob Mercer (his magazine was floundering by then) that what he needed was youth but with some content. This involved me taking pictures of three young and beautiful girls who were in the Senior Company of the Arts Umbrella Dance Program. But the picture never ran nor did my interview with the three as Mercer ceased publication of his magazine (re-named My Vancouver) in March.

Last Saturday I attended the Arts Umbrella Expressions Festival 2009 that featured the Apprentice Company Dancers (one year behind the Seniors) and the Seniors in one extremely long (three hours) but exhilarating string of performances. Rebecca, Lauren and I managed to sit where we wanted at the Vancouver Playhouse. We sat centre, front row. Our purpose was to be able to hear the dancers breathe.

I had seen these dancers grow up as had Rebecca. Rebecca did not receive all the encouragement she should have at home so she decided to abandon both her dance and her piano lessons. I was able to find a way of saving the latter but not the former. It was my hope that Rebecca would get excited at seeing her ertswhile Arts Umbrella dancers and just might want to return. But this was not to be. Only Lauren (6) is enthusiastic about learning to dance at the Arts Umbrella this fall.

As per usual the performances were top notch, choreographed by noted choreorgraphers D.A. Hoskins, Chengxin Wei (Ballet BC Dancer), Gioconda Barbuto, Roberto Campanella, Joe Laughlin, Francisco Martinez, Sidra Bell, Lina Fitzner (I saw her backstage on Saturday night and she looked absolutely stunning, but then I love red hair), Donald Sales (ex- Ballet BC dancer) and Azure Barton.

All those young girls that I had last seen as the Apprentice Company Dancers, now as the Seniors where to my delight all grown women with bodies to kill for. But I have to confess here that this inveterate Latin man who has always been interested in the female form had his eyes mostly for the boys who were now men. These were the boys I had written about for VLM. Only one was missing, Jeremiah Kennedy (a red head!) who had the best smile of them all. In the picture here Jeremiah is upper right. Upper left is Michel Issa Rubio, bottom left is Jed Duifhuis and bottom right Scott Fowler.



My favourite female dancer, seen in the picture with the four boys is Nina Davies. She had the ambition to join Cirque du Soleil. She was uncommonly flexible. But a year ago she suffered from a back injury so she has not been able to dance since. She is now 18 and her parents are sending her to Europe.

The boy (now a tall young man) on the left, Michel Issa Rubio has a style that is all his own. It is part macho Mexican (he was born in Mexico) and part street fighter/hip-hop. While I am no expert on dance I was able to determine that his style is so personal and unique that he must continue with dance. Bottom right, Jed Duifhuis is very tall and strong and he is a solid partner to the increasingly taller dance girls of our century. I can see him being recruited by all kinds of dance companies. Scott Fowler, bottom left, reminds many of an extremely young Mikhail Baryshnikov. When I last saw him he was a virtuoso little boy. That is no longer the case as he is no longer tiny and has gained meny inches in height. He is but somehow he is not yet a senior dancer. He is much too young to graduate. This means we will have another opportunity to see him next year! The young man I saw perform on Saturday night is what I would call a fenómeno a Spanish word reserved to label all those with unexplained talent.

But from the first moment of the first dance, D.A. Hoskins’ Fruit, my eyes narrowed down the field to watch senior dancer Alex Burton. When I talked to him a couple of years ago he told me that he wanted to be an architect (like his father) and that he loved to explore buildings as spaces for dance. The thought he could combine both professions.

I am sure that one of his mentors at Arts Umbrella, dancer Emily Molnar (on the left with Alex in the middle and Arts Umbrella Dance Director Artemis, Artie, Gordon on the right) would not be surprised in the least as she has repeatedly told me how dancers have intimate knowledge of space and how to work within its boundaries. I am sure that our very own architect, Arthur Erickson would not quibble if we defined that as architecture.



Every time Alex Burton moved on stage I could not look at anybody else. And it was like that for me until the end.

But I did notice the girls and in particular these three in the top picture that would have appeared as the Three Muses in the VLM essay I was going to write. On the top left it’s Alex Parrett, bottom left it’s Alyson Fretz. On the right is Caroline Kirkpatrick. I have a special fondness for both Caroline and Alyson as when they were young girls they were “helpers” in Rebecca’s first ballet class with Andrea Hodge. Rebecca had a tendency to daydream and Caroline or Alyson would set her straight. Again without any much knowledge on dance matters (except I have seen lots of it) I see Caroline as a future choreographer of note. Wherever she goes she is always the centre as she is in my picture. Parrett danced her heart out all night. I would believe that she did not wake up until very late the next day. She was all energy and grace.

For some reasons on the Saturday that we went (there was another performance the day before) there was not all that much of Alyson. But when Alyson was on stage, she was the only one who managed to steer my eyes away from Alex Burton. At last year’s Arts Umbrella program at the Playhouse I watched Alex and Alyson dance together. I don’t remember seeing so much electricity between dancers before. I itch to see them soon in a future performance of Prokofiev’s ballet Romeo and Juliet. Where are you John Alleyne when we need you?

Sunday, May 03, 2009


In these last months that I have been teaching photography I have noticed that some of my students (most are quite intelligent) who may be in their early 20s or even 30s have no concept of the former existence of Life Magazine. When I point out to my class (usually an even split beween women and men) that Life’s first cover on November 23, 1936 was taken by a woman, Margaret Bourke-White I am met by blank expressions. I am no longer shocked as I simply think that few now would know of events that happened 73 years ago. At the same time my 11-year-old granddaughter Rebecca can use Microsoft Word with no problems and knows all about different typefaces and font sizes. At age 11 I had no inkling of such things. My students have simply traded knowledge of one thing for another. It is up to me to more or less set them straight on the origins of photography and perhaps this might help them in their pursuit of success in this now difficult medium.

When my Sunday New York Times comes crashing on my doorstep sometime around 7pm on Saturday night I try to ignore it. At one time the paper would arrive much later, much as the daily weekday version does. But the delivery people have become most efficient and I am left with that terrible agony of not wanting to delay the reading of the paper to Sunday morning. Be it Saturday night or early Sunday morning, the first part of the paper I look for is the one titled Week In Review. It will usually have a fine column by Frank Rich and another by Maureen Dowd. The rest is usually extra scrumptious gravy. This is the best section of the paper. Today’s Week In Review visually blasted me with a photograph that had me staring at it for a long time (yesterday it was!). It is a panoramic shaped portrait of retiring American Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter taken when he was attorney general of New Hampshire in the 1970s. The photograph is credited: Ken Williams/Concord Monitor, Via Associated Press.




Before I go into my analysis of this striking portrait I would like to point out that the credit for the on-line version is different. It is Jim Cole/Associated Press. This is an interesting discrepancy that has no bearing with my story here. What does have is the fact that there are subtle differences between the look of the hard copy version and the one I see on my monitor.

For years I have received much criticism for taking portraits of people looking at my camera, either most seriously or imagining that they are smiling without in fact doing so. Consider the one here, top left of theatre director Roy Surette, and artistic director of Victoria’s Belfry Theatre. It was American photographer Gregory Heisler who publicly criticized Annie Leibovitz for spoiling it for those photographers who tried to look into the soul of their subjects. Heisler remarked that thanks to Leibovitz now photographers had to photograph people doing something. In some cases this doing had to be an eccentric activity like hanging upside down from a tree or bathing in milk.

This has waned a bit as Leibovitz filed for bankruptcy and Heisler, more or less still relatively unknown, has been vindicated. I wonder what Heisler would say of how portraits are now lit, or in most cases not lit. The advent of the do-everything DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex Camera) has made a generation of photographers to so rely on the camera in hand that they don’t consider the possibilities of “tethering” (be it wirelessly or with a cord) the camera to a light and not depending on the light that is available or that pop-up flash that makes it all so easy and, oh so! Flickr.



In the 19th century, before the advent of electrical light portraits, be they photographic, painted or drawn, the rendering of them relied on window lighting or light coming down from large skylights. Such light creates shadows. Shadows give shape to the body and to the face. Shadows hint at the three dimensionality of a person’s face or body on a medium that lacks that third dimension. Flat lighting does away with what in photography is called modeling. Modeling is the contouring of a person’s face with shadows.

What is striking about this portrait of a young David H. Souter is the shading. One side of his face is light the other is dark. The nose somehow (I have never really known how, exactly!) projects an inverted pyramid on his left cheek that those who know call Rembrandt lighting. The absolutely black part of his neck is sharp edged to an area of relative lightness. Again I have never known exactly why except that this is a feature of window lighting or that of a photographic soft box that is placed to one side of a person’s face. The photographer (is it Ken Williams or Jim Cole?) has taken ( I am loathe to use the 2009 term capture) a photograph that shows Souter to be intelligent, urbane and there is, furthermore, just a hint of of a smile. Do either Cole or Williams know of my trick? I tell my subjects, “Think about smiling, very hard, but don’t.”

Colour photographs to this writer are much more effective when there is a lack of colour. A businessman in a dark suit in which the warmth of his skin colour hints that the portrait is in indeed in colour is an example. Contemporary portraiture seems to stress extremely bright, sharp and contrasty colours. This portrait of Souter is the more remarkable in that it has no colour. It is black and white. It stands out in the virtual Babel rainbow of our times.

The discrepancy between the look of the hard copy version, the second picture here and the on-line version, the third picture is due to the manipulation of the scan (this photograph was either a scanned negative or a scanned b+w glossy from a newspaper’s file). The one on my monitor has more of a halo between Souter’s dark side of his head and the back wall. The print version has a more uniform fading into the darkness of the wall. If anything I would like to point out that both images are striking but one might be affected by one over the other without really knowing why. Our ability to subtly change and modify (or not so subtly) the look of a photograph is something that should be considered by all of us and particularly by politicians. Shifting a politician’s face colour from an attractive flesh colour to one that goes into the cyan, the green, or the blue can directly affect our perception of the politician’s qualities and or defects without us being consciously aware.



In the last picture here, a self-portrait by Vancouver Mayor, Gregor Robertson (in my studio, with my camera and facing a large mirror) you can see the modeling on his face, the Rembrandt lighting and that curiously attractive light area right next to the dark side of his face. If I were to up the contrast and open the dark shadows with Photoshop, that area around his head would halo much like in the on-line version of Souter's ever so beautiful portrait.

Addendum: April  6, 2011

name: Ken Williams

comments: The portrait of David Souter on your blog is mine and not Jim Cole's. It was taken while Souter was AG in his Concord, NH office and I worked for the Concord Monitor. I corrected this on the NY Times site but the confusion continues. And, yes it was window light and not a softbox.
Thanks for the post.

Ken Wiliiams, Canterbury, New Hampshire, 03224

Saturday, May 02, 2009


On Thursday I took Hilary to the SPCA to look for a cat that would replace her Raúl who has gone missing for two weeks. Raúl is 15 years old and he was not well. After seeing a cat she liked (he was an orange cat called Rufus) she said she would wait and have Bruce and the girls see it. Alas this was not to be as when we returned with the girls today Rufus was being put in a carrying box to be taken home.

There was one wonderful moment on Thursday. I took Hilary to Kaplan’s and we had a Montreal smoked meat sandwich which we enjoyed with a black cherry soda. On our way to her house I passed by Montgomery, between 42nd Street and 41st and I had to stop the car. There were trees on that block that I had never seen. They had rugose silver white leaves. One of the trees had been recently planted. It had a tag! The tag read Sorbus aria ‘Lutescens’. A sorbus is commonly called a Mountain Ash which is a member of the very large rose family. While it is called a mountain ash it is not an ash as an ash is from a different genus, Fraxinus.

I could not figure why this variety was called 'Lutescens' as that means yellowish, and I could not see yellow anywhere.

I went home and did some investigation with my tree books. This tree is called a whitebeam and the mysterious yellow is to be found in the down of the silvery young leaves. There is a hint of that in the upper view of the scan seen below left.

The long row of whitebeams on Montgomery was dazzling. They were ghosts that cheered me up. I will have to return to see what the summer white flowers look like. Like many mountain ashes the whitebeam will have clusters of red berries in the fall.



When Rebecca found out that Rufus had been taken she cried. I could not console her. It seems that she has grown up just a bit with the experience while Lauren seem to show no emotion. Perhaps at age 6 she was not aware how quickly Rufus won our hearts and how fate then broke them.

Addendum: I became curious on the closeness between sorbus and sorbitol. The connection is logical. Here it is:

Sorbitol, a sugar substitute also occurs naturally in many stone fruits and berries from trees of the genus sorbus.

Friday, May 01, 2009


Miss Lydia Louisa Summerhouse Donkins informs Mrs. Cameron that she wishes to sit for her for her photograph. Miss Lydia Louisa Summerhouse Donkins is a carriage person, and therefore, could assure Mrs. Cameron that she would arrive with dress uncrumpled. Should Miss Lydia Louisa Summerhouse Donkins be satisfied with her picture, Miss Lydia Louisa Summerhouse Donkins has a friend who is also a Carriage person who would also wish to have her likeness taken.

I answered Miss Lydia Summerhouse Donkins that Mrs. Cameron, not being a professional photographer, regrets she was not able to ‘take her likeness’ but had Mrs. Cameron been able to do so she would have very much preferred having her dress crumpled.
Julia Margaret Cameron