Saturday, April 06, 2013

Friday, April 05, 2013

Left, unknown US Civil War soldier, right John Alleyne & Gail Skrela

My wife is in a deep depression because she says that everything she wants to do involves money.

I feel helpless in being able to help as I look forward to that first day sometime in May when one of my fragrant roses will bloom and beckon me to sniff. It will be pleasure at no cost.

Today I read a lovely review, by Ken Johnson in my hard copy NY Times about an exhibition of American Civil War Photographs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As a young boy I was inspired to photography at a United States Information Service library in Buenos Aires where in an American Heritage Magazine I saw my first image of the American Civil War taken by one Timothy O’Sullivan. What particularly intrigued me is that the men in the photographs looked contemporary and yet in one of my first realizations of death, I knew that they were long dead. Important in the equation is the idea that while long dead they were alive in that photograph.

If I had the money I would be on the first plane to New York to see the show. Luckily in my extensive collection of books of the US Civil War I have many (not all) of the images shown at the Met.

Perhaps one day soon Rosemary will say, “I am tired of not having money and living in a valuable house. Let’s sell and then I can do what I want to do with money and you can go to the Met to see a show.”

And there is this show at the National Gallery of Pre-Raphaelites…

Thursday, April 04, 2013







Because in the late 70s and 80s I took photographs for Les Wiseman’sthly rock column, In One Ear in Vancouver Magazine I photographed many international and local bands.

Of all the local guitarists that I liked my favourite was the passionate virtuoso Art Bergmann.

But there was another, it seemed his antithesis, the cool, intellectual Bill Napier-Hemy who was the guitar brilliance behind the one Vancouver alternative scene band, the Pointed Sticks, that almost made it in worldwide fame. When I watched the Pointed Sticks my eyes always gravitated to the cool customer playing his brand of virtuoso guitar.

I have no memory of when in the 80s I received a call from Napier-Hemy asking me to photograph his new band Cinema. I did. I have no memory of whatever happened to the band. Napier-Hemy is the man on the right of the picture.

Wednesday, April 03, 2013

Session 1, contact 1

I will be having a gallery opening sometime in early May at Celia Duthie’s  gallery on Salt Spring Island. She and her husband Nick want to go in three directions. One is portraits, the other plant scans and the third (more to my liking) eros. In the beginning Duthie told me she wanted an erotic show to shock the otherwise bucolic inhabitants of the island. She may be changing her mind a bit as she has now told me that her Duthie Gallery is a family gallery. But we have arrived at a compromise of sorts. The gallery has a largish salon and a smaller one which happens to have a door. We are going to put the Eros stuff in that room! My guess is that Nick Hunt will screen those who can enter and view.

Session 1, contact 2

Meanwhile I am sifting through my extensive files in search of appropriate erotic stuff from my past while still shooting new stuff. In fact tommorrow Thursday I am shooting a young woman in my Malibu who will be going from plane-Jane/nerd to full blown latex as I snap my Nikons.

While sifting through files I arrived at the cigar pictures of Leslie smoking an H. Upmann on my psychiatric couch in my studio that was on Robson and Granville. She was wearing my Puerto de Liverpool (a high class Mexico City department store) pin-stripe suit. I remember that she was also wearing my brogue shoes for effect even if they didn’t show.

What intrigued me is that the files said Leslie – Cigar I and II. It seems we had two sessions.

My memory of why I took pictures twice came back when I looked at the contact sheets. For the first shoot she wore white underwear and I had very little back light so that the cigar smoke did not show well enough.

You might note that in the second shoot contact 1, if you start on the top right (that is the correct sequence of my camera) it is the bottom middle shot, the sixth exposure that was the keeper. And yet…

                         

Session 2, contact 1

Session 2, contact 2

Session 2, contact 3

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

Johnson & Materna

In the late 70s I worked as freelancer for Bi-Line, a gay and lesbian publication that was edited out of the West End by a man called Ron Langen. Writer Jack Moore and I were the only straight persons working for the publication. On the strength of the many pictures I took for the paper, pictures of very nude men and women, I was able to get a loan to buy some studio lights. The loan was given to me by an outwardly dour Scots woman at my Burnaby branch of the Bank of Montreal. After she saw my pile of Bi-Lines, she said, “You are obviously talented.”

To this day I will never hide the fact that I worked for Bi-Line. I had lots of fun and it certainly opened my eyes. At the time they had yet to give weekly fetish parties on Thursdays in Burnaby. I did not know why K-Y Jelly was a better product than vaseline.

For many one’s past can come to haunt a profitable and established career in mainstream life in our city. In the late 70s and 80s I knew many strippers. One nightmare, for them, is to be recognized now, in public, as having been part of that profession.

While having worked for Bi-Line had made me a bit less conventional in my beliefs I was still in slight shock when writer Ben Metcalfe, sometime in the early 80s told me that I was going to photograph a couple of “porn ladies” for his Vancouver Magazine column Dilations. He snickered as only Ben Metcalfe could and told me I was going to have fun. I was to later find out that porn ladies they were really not.

I met the two women at one of their homes. Just in case the two women are either working for a school board or other sensitive organizations I will say that their names were Johnson and Materna. I was shocked to see a painting of male nude in which you could discern what was then (and still is) an unmentionable male sexual organ - the scrotum.

Even though I was yet to be even moderately sophisticated in my shooting style I knew enough not to have the two women pose side by side to one of their paintings. But I was still stupid enough to include that fern in the picture. I arranged it so that the painting would be seen reflected in the mirror. I knew that the picture that was to appear in Vancouver Magazine would be small enough so that most people would not notice the male purse.

I recently contacted one of the artists who told me that the purpose (a sort of political statement) of the exhibition (she was to graduate from Emily Carr) was to show paintings of men in the same way that men tended to paint nudes of women. There are persitent rumours out there that Doris Shadbolt was so shocked by the show that she tried to close it.

Since that early 80s show and my vague memory of the kafuffle between Paul Wong and the Vancouver Art Gallery, it would seem that nothing artistically shocking has happened in our city.

Perhaps the reason for it is that our city is provincial in the original meaning of that word. A brand new state-of-the-art Vancouver Art Gallery would have an avant-garde shell in which the inside would remain the same, art for a provincial city.

More Dilations by Ben Metcalfe

Monday, April 01, 2013

Sunday, March 31, 2013

Joanne Dahl

When I taught at Focal Point I used to tell my students that the formula of having a model in a studio with:


1. A backdrop

2. Your model

3. Your light

4. Your camera (perhaps like in my case on a tripod)

5. You

meant that you had five parallel lines of people and stuff that would never meet or as one says in plane geometry, converge.

And yet I am always amazed how that formula, a formula for almost certain failure, every once in a while produces an image like this one that I took many years ago of a woman called Joanne Dahl.