Saturday, October 24, 2009


It was at St. Edward’s High School in my Junior year that Brother Dunstan taught me about catharsis. He told us that the ancient Greeks went to see tragedies knowing exactly what the resolution would be yet they would not be sure of the details. At some point during the play, or right after, the audience (and the actors, too) would experience a a satisfying purging of their emotions which Aristotle named a catharsis. This is why plays are so useful in explaining to us the intricacies of our emotions and how they play in our life.

I sat with Rebecca tonight watching the Playhouse Theatre Company Production of The Miracle Worker, beautifully directed, just right by Meg Roe. From our second row seats we were able to discern every emotion, every tick, every gesture of the actors including the exceptional young girl, Margot Berner who plays Helen Keller.

At the point where Helen Keller makes that important connection between the sign language spelling of water with the water itself (and is finally able to think through the discovery and use of language, I could feel tears running down. It was Brother Dunstan’s catharsis.

In the car Rebecca said (showing me a Kleenex with black smudge marks), “I should get my money back on this Maybelline makeup, it runs.” “Did you experience a catharsis?” (I had explained to Rebecca the concept.) I asked her. “It’s none of your business,” she answered. I drove home with a smile thinking about Brother Dunstan and how lucky I was to have had him for a teacher and how lucky to have Rebecca as my granddaughter.



I took the pictures of Rebecca here today after lunch using a hefty Nikon F-3 loaded with Kodak Tri-X. The lens was a 50mm f-1.4 and my exposure was f-2.8 at 1/60 second. Holding that solid F-3 and listening to the "I-mean-business" motor drive was a catharsis in itself.

Friday, October 23, 2009


Just a couple of days ago I sold a photograph of Robertson Davies to a Barcelona publisher. I have been dealing with with a M. Àngels whom I suspect is a woman called María de los Ángeles. She refuses to reply to my Spanish and sends me letters in French. But she did indicate in English, “We are interested about the attached image. This is the mosaic of faces.” The picture in question is a scanned contact sheet. She must be young enough to have not concept (and this is most understandable) as to how we photographers used to (and some of us still do) make contact sheets in the darkroom. I have become a tad lazy about making contact sheets in the darkroom since I can scan the negatives in a sleeve and get just about the same thing without mixing any chemicals. I have to admit it is convenient.



It has all made me think how the language of photography has changed and the hidden messages the language changes convey. A friend of mine from Mexico used to say, “I am going to make a photograph.” I thought it a bit too much in the same way I prefer the use of the word photograph to the slightly more pretentious image. I like to say I take photographs or I take pictures. The modern term now is to capture a photograph (and more often) to capture an image.



Because that captured image does not remain in the camera for long as modern photographers chimp (to look at the image in the back of the camera right after taking it) they are losing (to lose is a loss only when you realize what you are missing) the concept, that wonderful concept, of the latent image. This is about an image that is there even when you cannot see it. In the 19th century the term used was to develop or develop out the latent image. That perceived magic which is magnified when one sees a b+w print’s image emerge in a developer bath in the subdued reddish light of a darkroom an experience that is forgotten (if you once printed) or it is an experience never had if you never printed. As my students look at each other’s little screens I see the benefits. They are instant benefits.



When one begins photography, be it digital or the other there is an important breakthrough that some photographers achieve and some that never realize of its possibility. The beginning photographer (I was one) relished going into the darkroom to print a negative or negatives. I would spend hours deciding on the crop. Should I remove this or that part of the negative? I may have spent a lot of money on sheets of photographic paper doing this. Then one day I decided I was going to crop in the camera and print the whole negative. What helped me in this is that I would decide that a picture could be a vertical and a horizontal and I would shoot both of them. This meant I never had to convert a horizontal to vertical by cropping it.



Photographers who printed their own negatives had a way of conveying that they printed 100% of the image of a negative. The method was to file (a metal file) the edges of the negative carrier. The edge would go a bit beyond the edge of the film negative and the roughness of the filing made the edge/border of the printed photograph a personal signature. No two negative holders could be identical. In the best of those past worlds the filed-edge border meant the photographer had printed the photograph.

But as soon as photography was digitized that border could be copied and inserted around any picture, be it cropped or not. For a while this happened until the memory of what the filed edge represented was lost. These Photoshop filed-edge-look borders are called crazy borders now. It is no different than not knowing what that crank that was inserted in 20s cars was supposed to be for.

So when you see my photographs here with that "crazy" border it means that I have real darkroom prints in my files or I have recently printed some. If the pictures do not have the border it means that I have scanned the negative.

The pictures here are of Susan Fiedler. I wrote about her before here and here.

I think I have to look for someone like Susan to inspire me to take some new photographs. Meanwhile I will not forget what do to with that crank if the motor does not start.

Latent image 
Images of plants neither scanned nor photographed 
That unkind cut

Thursday, October 22, 2009

When Charlie speaks of Lester
You know someone great has gone
The sweetest swinging music man
Had a Porkie Pig hat on.
Joni Mitchell



The saxophone
carries 18 to 21 brass keys,
and as many keys of harmony
as two and a half octaves can contain.
Press these keys, people dance
and dream of children
and the means to keep them alive.
From Prez - Homage to Lester Young by Jamie Reid


Gavin Walker told me today that just about every third blog has a picture of Rebecca or I mention her. The fact is that from the very beginning, some almost four years ago, I realized that my blog was going to be about self-discovery and that it was going to be a self-discovery based upon my attempt to get to know and understand my granddaughter Rebecca. Just about anything I do, on any given day, I can relate to her. I sense this even when I talk with Rosemary. We are re-living our youth by experiencing the excitement of one who is young and full of an interest in undiscovered things.



If I play a CD that Rebecca has not ever heard in the living room on Saturdays or in the car, she will invariably enquire. For as long as she keeps enquiring I will look for CDs that she will ask about that may have an interesting story.



So it was last Saturday that I put Joini Mitchel’s homage to Charles Mingus, Joni Mitchell- Mingus, who was in Cuernavaca, Mexico dying (he died on January 5, 1979). The CD starts with a strange Happy Birthday and I then is followed by one of the most beautiful jazz tunes ever composed, Mingus’s Goodbye Pork Pie Hat. In the CD, Mitchell composed lyrics for the song and sings it. Rebecca said nothing. Later in the car I played the definitive version of it from Mingus’s 1959 album Charles Mingus/ Mingus Ah Um. Rebecca was all ears. There is a remarkable tenor saxophone solo by John Handy III, where he seems to play more than one note at the time. I would have called it harmonics but Gavin Walker explained that Handy had played trumpet in high school and he had good control of what he could do with his mouth. The technique is called flutter-tonguing.



I found out a few days after Saturday that Rebecca had told Rosemary that she really did not like Joni Mitchel’s Goodbye Pork Pie Hat and preferred the Mingus/Handy version.

This Sunday Rebecca and I will be attending the Abraham Rogatnick Memorial at the Law Courts and Gavin Walker will be playing an alto saxophone solo of Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof. “I look forward to meeting up with Rebecca,” he told me.” And then he added, “I will be sure to mention to her that I approve of her taste for music.”



I have no photographs of Mingus (whom Rosemary and I saw perform so many years ago at Oil Can Harry’s on Alberni and Thurlow) nor of anybody wearing a pork pie hat. Gavin Walker told me that Mingus wrote the song in homage to saxophonist Lester Young who had died a couple of months before. Lester Young had a fondness for pork pie hats.



I had to find an excuse to write about this and with no pictures at hand I remember that I told Rebecca last week that the sound of Goodbye Pork Pie Hat is the sound of New York on a cold and melancholic rainy evening. It is the sound of a city going to sleep. It is the sound of a New York that I have visited twice. It is a sad sound for me. I will someday correct that feeling and make it a happy occasion by discovering New York again in the company of Rebecca.

Wednesday, October 21, 2009



It was in 1999 or perhaps 1998 that I received a phone call from my friend and white-collar crime investigator Adrian du Plessis. He told me that he had a friend called Nina who he thought was a promising photographer. He asked me for advice on equipment he should buy for her. He then asked me if I would mentor her for a while or give her some lessons> I wasn’t all that keen but I could not refuse du Plessis. I don’t remember all the details on how I contacted Nina or if she contacted me. Nina showed up at my studio and I was startled to see a young woman who looked like a young girl who really was a young woman.



She had been born in British Guiana and she seemed to have gypsy blood. Nina and I did a mano a mano. I had never done this before and I have never done it since. She was really good and she knew what she wanted to do. We shared my camera and one roll of 220 film. That means that there were 18 (two were blanks we didn't shoot) exposures. We took turns at taking each other’s picture.



You can see all 18 here. I have always felt guilty over the fact that while I may have taught Nina a few things about photography I ended up taking her picture and she became one of the best nude models I ever had. She is now living in Spain and just wish she would return. I just wish, if indeed she has Gypsy blood, that she might feel restless and move.

Monday, October 19, 2009


At 12 Rebecca has reached that threshold of adolescence which is marked by some confusion. I think it has come much earlier that it ever did for me.

In the 9th grade I was at St Edward’s High School, a Catholic boarding institution in Austin, Texas. I was barely 15. I remember making a scrap wood and tree branch shelter out in the bush with my friend John Straney. We would sit down and play the game of memorizing the correct names for all the WWII German fighter planes, bombers, tanks and battles. It was our secret hiding place. By the second semester John was no longer interested. I could not play the game alone.

Before I had moved from Buenos Aires to Mexico City in 1952 (I was 10) I had been playing toy soldiers with my Filipino cousin Robby. We had American GIs. My favourite had a bazooka on his shoulder. The nasty German and Japanese soldiers we blew up with our imagination. We dug little foxholes in my mother’s garden for our own version of the Battle of the Bulge. We flooded my mother's flower beds with a hose for the Battle of Leyte Gulf and fought each other as to which of us would say, "I shall return." In 1953 Robby and his family moved to Mexico. We followed a year later. When we arrived at the Mexico City airport I was shocked to see that Robby was taller and he had something on his face that I had never seen before. They were pimples. He did not want to play toy soldiers with me.

I would think that Rebecca will soon abandon the on-line computer game of dressing up celebrities. One day soon she will tire of Nancy Drew. I should not speed this up as soon she will not want to spend Saturdays with her boring grandparents. After all there will be all those boys to conquer.

That is why it is a pleasure to watch Lauren (7) play mostly by herself when she is not being read by Rebecca or Rosemary. I love to watch her slide in her socks on our wooden living room floor. At home she plays for hours with her large dollhouse. This past Saturday I delighted in watching her play her shoebox and rubber band guitar. The power of the imagination of a child must be kept for as long as possible. I will be most careful not to tell either Rebecca or Lauren to grow up.

Oskar (The Tin Drum) would approve.

Sunday, October 18, 2009

A Brevarium In Codex Seven times a day I praise you.
Ps. 119:164



Breviarium for the use of Dominican Nuns
Germany : s.n., ca. 1430
LAT 096 B84g

This breviarium was penned in upright Gothic (lettres batardes) with eighteen lines to the page in black, red and blue; including numerous large initials on the finest vellum. Inside, a twelve page calendar is preceded by a circular sun and moon with double circles in gold, silver, red, blue and green. The first page and page 167 are decorated in gold and other colours, with decorative borders and wide margins. The breviarium comprises 536 pages and has its original cover made of brown calf skin over oak boards. The locking clasps on the cover are missing; it is also surrounded by borders that were blind tooled with the words Ave Maria Gratia plena. This is considered to be a very beautiful German MS. in perfect condition, circa 1430.

The breviarium was purchased for the Vancouver Public Library in the 1930s from a retired janitor in Kamloops; it may have been brought to Canada from Germany by a pioneering family.

Photo Above from Vancouver Public Library Special Collections Web Site





I had forgotten that palpable excitement that would rush through me when in my youth I would enter a good library. For close to 65 years I have frequented bookstores and spent lots of money buying books. There is little space left for them in our house. The public library has become a practical option. I had forgotten the wonder of randomly finding something that would suddenly interest me. I had forgotten that library staple, a stack called “New Books” and the pleasure of picking up each book and reading the book jacket.

On Saturday, after lunch I took Rebecca and Lauren to the main branch of our public library. I had done my homework the day before. I told the girls, “I have a surprise for you on the 7th floor. We could take the elevator but I would rather prolong the mystery by insisting we take the escalators." By the time we got to the 7th floor and on side Rebecca read the sign that said “Special Collections” she asked me what it was we were going to see. “Wait a few minutes and you will see,” I answered.

There were two female librarians. One of them looked extremely serious while the other one did not look like she had ever cracked a smile since books adopted the codex style. I decided she was the better bet and showed her an item that was underlined in a sheet of paper I had brought with me: Breviarium for the use of Dominican nuns.... 096 B846.

Both women disappeared for a while and they returned with a wheeled cart on which lay a smallish black box and a pillow. The more amenable of the two then put on a pair of cotton gloves and gestured to a nearby table. She placed the pillow on the table, opened the box and removed one of the nicest books I have ever seen that close. We all marveled at the sight and I asked the woman if she herself had ever seen it. She told us that she had been asked to show it a couple of times in the past. And she smiled!



We went down the escalators and spent a pleasant afternoon looking at books in the children’s room which is most spacious. As we left for home with our booty (I had found a pop-up book on mummies that Lauren wanted to borrow and Rebecca, this time eschewing teen magazines took out three novels.) I experienced the realization that I had forgotten how exciting it is to visit libraries.

As soon as we got home I told Rebecca we were going to watch a film. She protested and told me she wanted to read. I was not going to argue with that! She lay down on our living room’s psychiatric couch to read her novel.






After dinner we watched from the series (The Artists’ Specials) the film Monet – Shadows & Light. It was beautifully done. As soon as it was over I brought into the den a nice big picture book from my collection called Impressionist Women by Edward Lucie-Smith. Rebecca, Lauren and Hilary looked at the pictures. Some were almost like still images from the film we had seen. Rebecca pronounced the name of the painters in her oh-so-nice French, Berthe Morisot, Eva Gonzales, Mary Cassat, Camille Pissarro, Edouard Manet, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, etc. I felt content as I took the girls home.

Lauren had her own prize, too. Before the film we had seen the short film Madeline’s Rescue based upon the book by Ludwig Bemelmans and splendidly narrated by Christopher Plummer.

Of course the two films I checked out from the Vancouver Public Library.

Special Collectionshttp://vpl.bibliocommons.com/search?q=special%20collections&t=keyword