Saturday, November 14, 2009


I think that the worst fact about good times is that we rarely realize that they are indeed good times. At least that has been the case for me. Looking back at going in a private jet, a Cessna Citation, to León, Guanajuato for a magazine to photograph a story on a Canadian pioneer flyer living in San Miguel Allende, I now know that for contemporary photographers, that would simply not happen. The magazine would find a photographer in San Miguel and instruct her to take some quick ones and send them back via e-mail.

In my files I have portraits of many acting and directing luminaries of film. As an example I am most proud of my medium format camera, and studio lights portrait of Werner Herzog. At the time of my picture he had come to Vancouver sponsored by the Goethe Institute in Vancouver. The institute is long gone from Vancouver and directors, actors, authors are now interviewed from their home (meaning on the phone) and some less that honest publications hide the fact that many of those interviews are question-and-answer ones via email.

Saturday was such a melancholy one, (besides the fact that it was visually gray and dreary) that I postponed the writing of Saturday’s blog to today. Today, Sunday, brought a scary NY Times Magazine that has articles and articles about how our life has changed and is changing.

Perhaps the most depressing of the articles is a review of Harold Evans’ My Paper Chase- True Stories of Vanished Times in the NY Times Book Review. The review is headed by : When Type Was Poured Hot – In his new memoir, Harold Evans recalls an exuberant run into 20th–century journalism.

By the random nature of looking for DVD films at the Main Branch of the Vancouver Public Library I found a film called Edges of the Lord (the name becomes significant at the end of the film) directed by an unknown (for me) Yurek Bogayevicz about life in a little village in Poland during the brutal occupation of the Wehrmacht and the transporting of Jews in trains to their final solution. The film has the surprising casting of Willem Dafoe as the chain-smoking village priest and a string of child actors that is extraordinary. The film is rated R and Rebecca pointed this out to me. I took my chances and I think I was right in that the film (“I would not want to see it again, it was so depressing,” Rebecca told me.)had the three of us glued to the antique Sony Trinitron TV.

The realism of a young boy shooting an older young man who is systematically going through the possessions of Jews who managed to jump out of a slowing train, before killing them or handing them over to the Germans was brutal. Rebecca understood. I don’t think Lauren (7) did. But then when the film ended she said, “That was a good movie.”

The final scene has the four children being given their first communion by a most understanding Dafoe. When time comes to slip the wafer host into the mouth of our little heroic protagonist (a Jew, told by his parents, before he was sent to the village, to mimic Catholicism for his survival) he shows the boy that the wafer is not the round blessed one, the body of Christ, but the unblessed edges removed by the priest when making them. He is in cahoots with the boy and one religion respects the other.

I understood and when the appropriate time comes in the next few weeks I will have to explain to Rebecca (who will never have a first communion as her grandfather once did) what it is that transubstantiation is supposed to be. These mysteries, complex mysteries that they are, believe in them or not, bring in a level of complexity into one’s thought that will enrich one’s life.

A little boy, younger than our heroic Jewish protagonist wills himself to join a train going to his final destination. He is not Jewish. He is a fervent little Catholic boy who the director makes into a little Christ who feels he has been left alone by his father and willingly then goes towards his death.

Perhaps Rebecca will not see the film again. But once I explaina to her what was going on I hold my hopes that she will change her mind.

There is no more hot metal type, and journalism as I knew it is mostly gone. A memory of it is all we need to bring back a complexity in life that could not be simplified into HTML.

Friday, November 13, 2009


It was in 1965 (I have a mental block for the month of the year or the day) when the phone rang at the retired U-boat officer’s pension. It was for me. A man with a crisp British accent said, “Alexander your old man kicked the bucket yesterday. He died on the street and was taken to the hospital by a vigilante (cop). You have to go to the police station to sign some documents. I am terribly sorry.” The man with the crisp British accent was an Armenian who had worn the kilt of the Black Watch in WW-I. His name was Leo Mahjdoubian and we all called him Uncle Leo even though he wasn’t our uncle.

For about a year, I had been going to lunch at his San Isidro home on Sundays. The food prepared by his wife Helen (who looked like a cross between Maria Callas and Yvonne de Carlo) was a treat from the humdrum (and even terrible) Argentine Navy barracks food. We would sit at the table accompanied by Leo’s two sons Julian and Leslie and friends. From the very beginning three separate pepper mills caught my eye. It seemed that each one had pepper from a different area of India and Madagascar. The meal started with a salad followed by some sort of pasta and then a huge roast beef with potatoes and Yorkshire Pudding. Before dessert we had soup which at the time was an Argentine custom. The idea was that if soup was well prepared you would have room for it between a meal and dessert.



The men were pushed upstairs for a siesta. At about four we were awakened and we went down to a high tea to die for.

During my stay in Buenos Aires Uncle Leo always asked me if I needed any money. He would say, “I made lots of money with my assurance company so if you need anything, just ask.” I felt guilty about his hospitality so when possible I would show up at the Sunday lunches with a large blue can of Edgeworth pipe tobacco. We both smoked a pipe and Edgeworth was my favourite brand. It was impossible to get it in Argentina but the officers of the US Navy for whom I worked as a translator provided me with some little benefits.



After World War I, Leo had decided to move to Buenos Aires. It may have been around the beginning of the 20s. At the time my grandfather Harry and grandmother Ellen lived in the Province of Córdoba. Harry had made good money working for a shipping company. He had moved from Manchester to Buenos Aires at the beginning of the 20th century. He came over with his first son Harry. In Argentina Harry and Ellen had five more children including my father. My guess is that in the mid 20s Harry had a heart attack and Ellen found herself a widow with six children. She moved to Buenos Aires and started a bed and breakfast (a glorified pension). Two boarders were to become important in my life and in the rest of the Hayward clan. It was at Ellen’s pension that Leo finally settled in as well as James Blew. James married my youngest aunt, Aunt Lilia. Leo had an easy going manner and he soon became an adopted member of the family. I believe that in later years Leo somehow was the family financier who might have even helped pay some of my father’s and my Cousin Robert Hayward’s gambling debts. I am only guessing this since anybody who could confirm it is long dead.



Before Uncle Leo died in the late 80s he sent me a photograph of my grandmother Ellen (Ellen Carter). It came with a backing that had a dedication by her. For about 10 years I misplaced this photograph. I found it yesterday filed with some of my self-portraits. The other picture here is of Ellen and her husband Harry.



The only grandparent I ever met was my mother’s mother so finding this photograph and remembering the Hayward side of my family gave me some comfort and nostalgia for those three-pepper mill days.

Thursday, November 12, 2009


Association takes one on strange paths. That latest path began this afternoon when I was on my way to pick up Rosemary from her physiotherapy (for her mending broken ankle) at the Vancouver General Hospital. Radio 1, CBC was running a story on the Jonestown Massacre of November 18, 1978. I was listening to the events that led to the shooting of US Congressman Leo Ryan and five others on the tarmac of the Port Kaituma airstrip. I was so distracted I kept driving for a few more blocks on 12th Avenue before I realized my mistake. I was never really able to ask my friend, photographer and model Nina Gouveia about it. She was born in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana). She is the only person, besides my life insurance agent, Winston Miller that I know that came from that remote little country in the bulge of South America.

Africa, via Haiti, not Guiana was on my mind most of the morning. Rosemary and I had caught, the night before, a wonderful documentary/trailer on the 1967 Peter Grenville film, The Comedians, based on the previous year’s novel by the same name written by Graham Greene. The novel was set in Haiti under the scary rule of François “Papa Doc” Duvalier and his secret police the Tonton Macoute. The film features Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Lillian Gish, Peter Ustinov and the very funny man (playing a very serious part) Paul Ford whom I remembered as the officer Sergeant Bilko (the Phil Silvers Show) bullied and mentally (and sometimes physically) ran over with his constant schemes.



The wonderful trailer was narrated by a youthful Richard Burton with running comments by Alec Guiness, Lilian Gish and Peter Glenville. Burton explained that by the time the film was being made the sitution in Haiti had so deteriorated that they had to look for another location. That location was the former West African French colony called by then The Republic of Dahomey and is now the Republic of Benin. They imported voodoo experts from Haiti to make sure everything looked authentic. While watching all this I thought of Picasso’s African Period (1907- 1909 which came after his Harlequin Period which had ended with his Le Mort d'Arlequin in 1905) and how it had inspired other artists to pursue African masks and Primitivism. Among the artists was Man Ray.




The first painting that Picasso had finished that was attributed to his new interest was his Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. The title can be misleading as d’Avignon was the most famous street in Picasso’s Barcelona as it was the location of a famous brothel.  The two “professionals" on the right seem to be wearing masks or perhaps they were a preview of Picasso’s journey towards Cubism.

By the time I brought Rosemary home I was determined to find a negative of a handsome black male dancer I had photographed for the Straight who had brought the concept of African primitivism to his choreography. I could not remember his name. But I got lucky. On the pile of stuff (which I have been clearing now for three days) next to the left of my scanner and on the floor I found a copy of the Georgia Straight.



It featured a picture that I had taken of dancer Cori Caulfield (in a most primitive pose of Eve biting on that apple) for the September 6-13, 2001 issue. This was the only real nude of mine that the Straight ever published.I convinced them that the crotch shadow was indeed a shadow as Caulfield at the time was under the influence of Brazilian un-hirsute primitivism. On another page I found my African (but Jamacan born) Ran Hyman. I ran to my dancer files and looked under H. There was nothing! He was filed under Ran.



I enclose here a picture of Guayanan (Guianan?) Nina Gouveia, that many of you have seen here. It is here for one reason. Just check out that skull. It is the same one. It was owned by my Argentine friends and Nora Patrich and Juan Manuel Sanchez. I never got to ask them how they had managed to buy that Picasso from his Musketeer period.

Wednesday, November 11, 2009


In all my years as a freelancer in Vancouver weekends were really no different from weekdays. Then there are the perceived seasons. Every time I run into someone who asks me, “How was your summer?” I either answer sarcastically or I don’t answer at all. What is seen as sarcastic is when I explain that since I work when I can, I don’t necessarily have summer holidays. Summer can be just like any other season. Sometimes I cite that beautiful moment in the Robert Redford film version of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby. Redford (in white slacks) and someone else are walking on the side of swimming pool. It is a brilliant and sunny afternoon. One of them says to the other something like, “It was a fine summer.”

For a freelancer I think that every day is a scary Monday and more so now with a decline in the magazine business and the resulting decline in the need for photographs. But I have to admit that weekends are now weekends for me. Saturdays are the days when Rebecca and Lauren spend the day with us. I anticipate their coming days in advance and I feel a bit on the sad side when I drive them and their mother home on Saturday nights. Mondays are now special, too (and less scary) as we take care of the kidsin the afternoon. I pick them up at school and cook a quick lunch for them. Hilary shows up later for dinner.



This last Monday I took Rebecca and Lauren to the main branch of the Vancouver Public Library, Both girls are feeling comfortable with the place and Lauren who has learned to read in English in the last weeks (she is in French Immersion) is able to find books and sit at the small tables and make her selections to borrow. Rebecca sits on the floor and looks at her choices. She loses track of time. I found a 2000 film version of Jack London’s Call of the Wild. I knew I wanted the girls to see it. But I also knew I had my own reason. The lead actor is Italian born actor Nick Mancuso whom I met in Vancouver some years back. After dinner (Rosemary had to work with her laptop) the girls, Hilary and I watched the film which was truer to the novel than the 1935 version with Clark Gable in which the whole plot revolves on Gable running into Loretta Young in the frozen wilderness and the dangerous thaw that follows. At first Rebecca wanted to go home. She was soon drawn in by the beautiful dog, Buck. I made it like I was being bored and that I was going to turn it all off. Rebecca knew I was kidding. It was an enjoyable evening and when I delivered them home it felt like a Saturday night.



Today Rosemary and I pollarded the hawthorn tree in the front and even though I wore gloves I got many nasty thorn punctures. I spent the rest of the day trying to get rid of the pile of photographs, negatives and slides that perennially occupy the floor on the left of my computer and scanner. No matter how I hard I try, there is always a pile. The problem is that I find long lost stuff in it. Today I found a beautiful print of my grandmother Ellen Carter (sent to me by my uncle Leo Mahdjubian about 17 years ago) which I had lost for about 6. I also found a set of b+w negatives that included some of Rebecca and Lauren riding some brooms that they converted to horses with cloth heads and sewn-on buttons for eyes.

When I found them I became melancholy. It was Wednesday but it felt like Saturday or Monday. I believe I must have taken the photographs last summer.

Jay Gatsby: Summer's almost over. It's sad, isn't it? Makes you want to - I don't know - reach out and hold it back.
Nick Carraway: There'll be other summers.

For me there was last summer with the broom horses, this summer, and, I hope Nick is right and that there will be more summers to come.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009


Honest blogs can be embarrassing sometimes. But then I believe that within limits a blog is a web log. And a web log is a digital diary. If I wanted to stress this idea I would begin every day’s blog with that ever so quaint Dear Diary, …

Sometime in the mid 60s I was a room boarder in a home owned by a retired U-boat man and his wife. I was in the Argentine navy and because of my English I was spared the horror of a small destroyer bobbing and yawing in the South Atlantic and had the privilege of a desk job and an Irish/Argentine secretary. I also had the choice of living in barracks and be subjected to vicious petty corporals who liked to play soldiers in earnest or I could opt to renting a room. I chose the latter. To pay for the room I worked as a waiter in a bar in the Boca on weekends.

I was 22 years old.

This is something the submariner’s wife could not understand. She would get angry at me when I had uncontrolled nighttime fluid emissions and I would “dirty” her pristine sheets. I tried to explain to her that I could not control my nighttime subconscious. So she insisted I sleep with a towel under me and over me. When I started getting dreams involving the Gestapo I decided to bid the submariner goodbye.

Now at age 67 when I walk on Granville on the odd late evening (something I do not do with any regularity) I do not look at the noisy bars (the noise has to make up for the lack of smoke or perhaps noise used to be dissipated by tobacco smoke) with any kind of jealousy or longing. I do not wish to be young and be looking for a woman or a partner or someone I may want to live with or marry. That is in my past. Perhaps the only advantage of youth that I am truly jealous of is that idea of falling in love, of even falling in love for the first time.



Time dulls all that and I don’t see myself dumping Rosemary, selling the house and buying a brand new Maserati to try to capture a lost youth. The Maserati I still own, is rusting in the garage and there is no way I will bring back my pipes. I would feel like that Playboy guy. He has no idea of what it is to have grace in old age and to make an unburdensome exit. Besides I can see at least one bed towel in my future as the body inevitably lets go of controls.

All this is but a prelude. It is an overture (if I am going to be repetitive about all this). It is setting up the reason for posting these two pictures here. There would be other pictures but there are self-imposed restraints that prevent me from showing you that not only does Quilla have a face to launch a fleet of triremes but a body that in water would have prevented that Eureka moment for Archimedes who would have sunk into his bath with a heart seizure.

We have had Quilla twice as one of our nude models at Focal Point. The first time was last year. She did not have a bank of tattoos all over her body. She has only one on her ankle (away from other more relevant areas) and would you guess that it has a saying in Spanish? It is something about the fact that if you don’t dare you won’t get anywhere.

It is my premise here that when one has arthritic pinkies (my case at the moment), a sore elbow (result of having broken it a couple of years ago) and when sustainability is simply, and, alas, only, being able to stay in bed in the morning, with some measure of controllable discomfort, in spite of having to go to the bathroom, any opinions I may have about the fair sex must be purely objective, with no vestige of desire or anything else.

This is comforting in many ways. It means that I may just approach Quilla in some future project that will help me sustain my interest in this momentarily unsustainable profession of mine which is photography.

Monday, November 09, 2009



Two events on the same day, last Thursday, November 5 left me with thoughts running around my head like cockroaches on a kitchen counter in the middle of the night in the tropics when one turns on the light. The activity was brutal.

At first one would think that former Vancouver city mayor Sam Sullivan’s unveiling of his Global Civic Policy Society at the Pan Pacific Hotel Crystal Ballroom would have nothing in common with the Solo Collective, Aaron Bushkowsky’s play The Project (directed by Rachel Peaks) which opened Thursday night at Performance Works on Granville Island.

The venues were different, the audience was different, the food was better (Sam had a better budget than the Solo Collective which was celebrating its tenth year of existence and had a modest table with goodies) but in the end it was a similarity in language that stuck out for me. Both events showcased the failure of language be it through repetition or through a false projection of relevant and instant intimacy.

Sitting between the lovely, refined and ever so much fun Leila Getz and Martha Lou Henley at the Crystal Ballroom of the Pan Pacific I heard host Mike Harcourt introduce UBC luminaries on the environment, density and other relevant urban affairs give short talks on Sam Sullivan’s organization which received a five hundred thousand dollar contribution from Charles Annenberg Weingarten and the Annenberg Foundation and from local philanthropists. It is Sullivan’s idea (based on practical experience) that more can be achieved to save our city, region and planet not through or within politics but by intelligent advocacy run by experts. I spotted such experts as former Councilor Gordon Price and urbanist Ray Spaxman. I was most pleased to see that Sullivan had taken some of the council from his Philosopher-King-mentor, Abraham Rogatnick and has brought into the fold of Global Civic, the gentle architect Bruno Freschi. With a bit of Sullivan's passion (with a bit of help from his wife Lynn Zanatta, picture above) the venture might succeed.

Had I had a golf counter in hand I would probably have suffered finger damage clicking the times I heard the words sustainability, affordability, peak oil, green, livability, global warming, carbon dioxide emissions, eco-density, and the expression, “our cars will grind to a halt.” It would seem that the very issues that are so important to our future wellbeing are defined by words, so often used, that they harmlessly bounce off our brain like Darfur, ethnic cleansing and pandemic.

At Performance Works The Project began with actress Sarah Rodgers mimicking in a simulated TV monologue those Saturday afternoon TV programs that my granddaughter Rebecca loves where Canadian celebrities appeal to our wallets by showing us starving children in darkest Africa. The only difference here was that the more Rogers put emotion into her delivery the more the crowd around me laughed. I could not understand why. It took me a while to get it. The whole play is populated by characters who talk in made-for-television cliché. While watching CNN’s Larry King Live I can only take a few minutes before his “instant” and “intimate” rapport with his subjects disgusts me into switching channels. Somehow, in the theatre I found it (eventually) very funny and I laughed with the rest. My Rosemary resisted, but she finally succumbed to the play and the excellent actors. Andrew McNee as Fred the famous (in the play) documentary maker was so perfectly believable I would have purchased a used clunker from him on the spot. Lindsey Angell (see, below, left) was so spot on as the really smart but paradoxically vacant Hollywood blonde that I felt sorry for her at times but marveled at her ability to come back in others. Alvin Sanders shifted from being the typical corrupt Dark Africa bureaucrat to a scary guerrilla leader (the ones that command others to cut off limbs) that I would have put my grandchildren to sleep easily by pointing at a true bogey man. The play came closer than the earlier lunch to showing me why nothing seems to ever get done in spite of all the talk.



Both events showed me that the way to our hearts and pocketbooks, if we are going to see any positive change is through the intelligent manipulation of language. The play, which so many might see as a comedy produced in me a realization, a catharsis of sorts on how language has deteriorated. Would it be possible for Franklin Roosevelt to affect us with his “Fireside Chats” in our present world? Would they be Twitterable? Will Sullivan’s Global Civic Policy Society achieve results by only circumventing politics?

I would think that Bushkowsky’s play points in the direction that the language of intimacy is at a crossroads. Intimacy has to be earned with time. There can be no (realistically) shining light on the road to Damascus while waiting in line for that Americano at Starbucks.

I feel that advocacy has taken away from us that ever so useful word gay so much in the vocabulary of that exquisitely funny and intelligent (and gay) Noel Coward. I feel the same way about those words I heard at the Pan Pacific luncheon. Sustainability for me has always meant to keep something up which at my age is mostly a pipe dream. We need to find new words to get that audience to listen to us.

I would seem to me that Sam Sullivan might just want to hire Aaron Bushkowsky and other local plawrights to help him. We only have to look in the direction of the Czech Republic to realize that playwrights can change history. I am sure that Voltaire would agree.


Addendum: Sustain has a Latin root sustinēre. It is curious that the Spanish who like to keep their language free, when possible, of Anglicisms and Gallicisms eschew brassiere and opt for the more Latin sostén. It would be nice to see such green ads as:

I dreamt I was far more sustainable in my Maidenform bra.

Sunday, November 08, 2009



For the last couple of years I have been trying to nail down the difference in appearance between digitally taken photographs and those exposed on film. I use the expression digitally taken as, particularly in my case, when my photographs are reproduced here, in magazines, newspapers and brochures those film images have to be digitized. I use an Epson V-700 scanner that came my way via the generosity of Georgia Straight editor, Charlie Smith. I scan my b+w negatives (old colour negatives), transparencies (35mm ones taken with my Nikons and 6x7 cm taken with my Mamiya RB-67). The scanning process brings with it an inherent extra contrast which I must then reduce by using Photoshop CS. This means that no matter how much of a purist I say I am (and I don’t) there is no such thing as a Photoshop-free image in this blog.



My Photoshop CS has an image adjustment feature called Shadow/Highlight. With it I can not only bring back the shadow detail lost by my scanner but also reveal a lot of that shadow detail that previously (I must admit) was not achievable even with very good photographic paper in the darkroom. To clarify this, what I want to say is that Photoshop is not inventing shadow detail that is not there, it is simply exploiting (a drawing out) the ability of good professional film (in my case Kodak Ektachrome-G) to capture shadow detail. Until the advent of digital imaging and printing and good printing presses this detail, which was always there, was lost to the limitations of that pre-digital age.

This means that my scanner in conjunction with Photoshop CS and Corel Paint Shop Pro-X (a little secret of mine) become useful tools for the conversion of my film images into digital ones. But I still think that my images look different from the ones to be found in the social networks like Facebook and Flickr. That difference I have come to understand is the slow demise of additional lighting (soft boxes and grid lights attached to studio lighting systems).



There is another difference and for that I must use the pictures I took of Rebecca yesterday afternoon in our living room. I used Kodak Tri-X and a Nikon FM-2 with two lenses. One was a 50mm F-1.4 and the other a 35mm F-2. My exposures were at the limits of hand-hold-ability, 1/30 at f-2 or 1.4. I did not want to sacrifice the small camera freedom by resorting to a tripod. I scanned the negatives as b+w negatives but scanners still include the red/cyan, blue/yellow and magenta/green. This means that I can tint the pictures to my heart’s content. These are the results of an extreme shift to red plus a tad of yellow.

By the very fact that I am using b+w film I am narrowing down my choices. The 400 ISO speed rating of my film further narrows down my choices.

The digital shooter is prone to shoot in colour (to increase options at the time of making decisions in the post-taking- the-picture which is called digital work flow. The digital shooter will use a mode called RAW in which the shooter can put as many eggs into the digital basket. I believe that it is here where the film shooter and the digital shooter diverge with a resulting difference in the appearance of the pictures (even if the digital photographer will swear up and down that it makes no difference and the digital image can be made to look exactly like the one with film).

I think that the difference occurs simply because the moment I use b+w film of a certain speed I reduce my options. By reducing my options I can spend time taking pictures not worried by the subsequent limitations. These subsequent limitations are the very reason for the look, at least in my case, of my pictures.



I planned yesterday’s shoot with Rebecca a week before. I called up Hilary and asked her to tell Rebecca to bring clothing she had been given as a gift. This was adult clothing owned a woman who is almost Rebecca’s size. I told Hilary to tell Rebecca that I was going to try to make her look 20.

Rebecca did not pay attention to my requests and only brought her blonde Halloween wig and a purple top and black sweater. We did not start in a pleasant manner and the session (very short as I only took 16 pictures) quickly deteriorated in a mutual shouting match. “I have a headache. I want a break. I want a rest. I don’t want to pose anymore,” she told me in her high-strung (could it be she might just one day be one of those high-strung models that make more in one hour than what I make in one month?) rapid fire voice. We stopped at 14 exposures and I felt abandoned and frustrated. But I also knew that I had some good pictures in those 14. Could it be that Rebecca’s imposition of a limitation on my shooting further explains why my pictures don’t look like so many of those in social networking sites?



For me these small camera sessions have brought an excitement of what it was like to take pictures when I was young before I became an all-knowing cynic. I will just have to be more careful as I collaborate in this re-exploration of an untethered photography. The way must lie through a little girl who in growing up knows she is in control. And she is.