Sheila Christie & Adrián Verdejo

 In the heyday of paid magazine and commercial photography in the 80s I regularly commanded a $2000 daily rate that did not (I repeat, did not include expenses such as gasoline, food and film). Logging and energy companies paid me this rate, in some cases for a whole week to shoot across Canada or to spend the week in BC, Alberta or Saskatchewan.

We all know that those days are long gone. This year I did a shoot for The Walrus that paid half that rate but it included all my film. 

As you might suspect, since film is expensive (in the 80s since our clients paid for film we used to say, “Film is cheap.”) the less film you use the more money you can rake in. This is especially important when what you rake in is minimal.

For years I have been shooting magazine assignments in which I might use only one roll of medium format transparency film (10 exposures in the 6x7 cm format).

In the last 10 years my magazine assignments have dwindled to nothing and I have spent more time behind my gas mower than behind my camera on a tripod. That is just the way it is.

But for the last 10 years the Georgia Straight has tapped me to shoot its Fall Arts issue. Perhaps around 5 years ago I would take the portrait of two dancers (each one individually), plus musicians, visual artists, comics and actors. 

The bean counters at the Straight figured that they had to pay me for 10 pictures plus the cover shot. So they had the idea that I would photograph those people two at a time even if in many cases the people involved had little in common or did not even know each other. This was a tough assignment.

This year I have noticed that they have imposed the same idea on the writer. Instead of the, let’s say, the theatrical writer having to write two individual pieces (and get paid twice!) they now combine the two actors as one piece.

I miss those single artist assignments. That is how I was able to photograph a brand new dancer in Vancouver called Emily Molnar. Alone I could do lots.

This year I had to photograph a ballet dancer with a tap dancer. Go figure!

If this might sound complex, and it is, consider that for this year’s Fall Arts Preview I used a camera I had only had in my possession for a week and a half and with which I had only taken five pictures. The camera in question is my first digital camera, a Fuji X-E1.

I must clarify here that all times during this assignment (last week) I had in my trunk my medium format Mamiya RB-67 Pro SD and film, just in case!

Just because I now had a digital camera in hand I was not about to suddenly succumb to its so-called virtues and shoot lots. Instead like Odysseus I lashed myself to the mast and ignored my Circe-like Fuji X-E1. For this week’s cover I did not shoot 10 exposures on a 120 format roll of transparency. I shoot 7 pictures with the digitals.

For the first of the pictures, the comedians I noticed that in my 5 or 6 exposures there was a variation in the edges. I corrected this in the rest of the assignment by attaching my little camera on to my very large tripod. It looked silly but I could concentrate on what I wanted without having to worry what was in or out of my frame.

 I checked the Straight’s cover today and I was astounded at the amount of shadow detail at the bottom. This is quite incredible as the both the singer and the guitar player are dressed in black and are standing on a black floor.

I shot the pictures with a rating of 100 ISO which is not recommended by Fuji as they note that I would get a reduced shadow detail!

Every year there is a theme. Last year I used an Arthur Erickson chair on an Arthur Erickson concrete wall (the roof of the Dance Centre on Davie).

This year the location was an unusual design studio run by Wendy Williams Watt on Maple Street. But if you notice in each of the pictures here (there are 6 not five as the dressed to the teeth actresses was an alternative cover) you will find either sculls, skeletons or skeletal hands. Why not?  

If you are perceptive enough by now you must have suspected that my film costs were reasonable.

And lastly I must thank Georgia Straight Arts Editor, Janet Smith for trusting this old man on a fun project for which I will even (can you imagine?) be paid.

A photographer photographs.

To do this a photographer has to have a camera. It has been many years since I left my house with a camera for those just-in-case moments or simply with the purpose of taking pictures that might interest me on the way somewhere. In my youth when I was in my early 20s and particularly when I lived in Mexico, which was exotic even though I had been there for many years there was always something that would spark my interest. I felt naked without the weight of my Pentacon-F or my newer Pentax S-3 around my neck. A camera, particularly these all-metal ones had heft and there was an impression that when I pressed the shutter button it was the beginning of an act of magic that would progress from the latent image in the negative to the backwards reality of the properly developed negative. From there, I would face the magical ending of seeing the image emerge in the developer bath.

With the ubiquity of people with cameras I am not sure if my initial statement, “A photographer photographs,” is valid now. Should this definition of mine be amended?

My 2007 Chevrolet Malibu sports a small Municipal Plate on its windshield. For about $235 I can legally park in back alleys and loading zones for 30 minutes for the purposes of loading or unloading. For many of us who have these plates it is normal procedure to abuse the privilege. I know all the safe spots in Vancouver where parking enforcement of Municipal Plate abuse is nonexistent (or almost so). I can abuse the city statutes for a whole year without getting a ticket.

This means that my Malibu is often parked in seedy back alleys. Nobody has ever broken into my car.

There is one back alley off Davie and Granville where I park when I go to Leo’s Camera. It was not too long ago that when I locked my car I noticed this doorway. While ignorant of the man’s talent I do know enough to surmise the man on the door is Nick Cave.  Just once, I took out the only camera I was carrying at the time, my iPhone 3G and I snapped.  Three days later the door was painted white.

 

Christopher Gaze

It seems to me that struggling artists are loved in Vancouver but as soon as they hit success they are methodically forgotten or considered too aggressive.

It seems to me that somehow we must be coy about achieving success. Perhaps our underlying ambition might escape notice.

Vancouver institutions, it seems to me experience the same slide in popularity. When was the last time you might have visited the Vancouver Umbrella Shop, or the Flag Shop? One of the most beautiful art galleries in our neck of the woods is the one in Surrey, the Surrey Art Gallery. Have any readers of this blog ever been there?

A writer, novelist, musician, composer, etc whose name I will not place here publicly while being on the board of the Canada Council proclaimed on CBC Radio that he/she had not been at the Vancouver Art Gallery since Luke Rombout was in charge when the gallery was on West Georgia.

We no longer, it seems to me, use that hackneyed term “world class”.

While on Skype with an Argentine intellectual friend of mine in Buenos Aires he complained the high cost of books there. And they do not have our Vancouver “world class” library there. He could not believe that I had found Manuel Vázquez Montalbán’s  Quinteto de Buenos Aires in Spanish in my local library. While Vázquez Montalbán wrote in Spanish even though he lived in Barcelona, Quinteto de Buenos Aires is one of the best novels ever written about the Argentine psyche.

Shortly before I left Mexico for Vancouver in 1975, my urbane friend Raúl Guerrero Montemayor warned me, and I translate from Spanish, “The fact that they are white in Vancouver, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they are civilized.” He was wrong then and even more now.

Next Sunday I am attending an intimate concert featuring the Microcosmos String Quartet. The bill is unique as they will be playing: Henry Purcell - Chacony in G Minor (arranged by Benjamin Britten), Béla Bartók - String Quartet No. 4 and Benjamin Britten - String Quartet No. 2. Is Vancouver a cultural backwater? I don’t think so.

It seems to me that one of our most treasured and unique (besides Stratford, Ontario, who else?) cultural and entertaining (yes! that too!) institutions is our perennial Bard on the Beach. Some of us might be aware that most of the summer-long productions tend to sell out. But are the same people (those who know) attending these plays every year? I don’t think so as I have noticed that when randomly these theatre goers are asked who is there for the first time, I have seen plenty of hands. This is encouraging.

But, it seems to me, that we have to take stuff a little less for granted and give credit where it’s due.

Bravo, Bard on the Beach and bravo to its Artistic Director, Christopher Gaze!

I write this late Saturday evening. The pleasant day with the two granddaughters and our daughter was not as pleasant as it could have been. My manipulative older granddaughter made sure of that. She may have created a conflict so she could leave, skip dinner and our family film to go where she really wanted to go, a date with a friend. Her mother knows her daughter too well and can see under all the subterfuge but my wife who believes in the innocence and goodness of most people cannot.

We managed and the four of us watched Inspector Morse in an episode called Dead on Time. I would not reveal too much of the plot except to say that one of the protagonists, a possible murder suspect at one time was a most dear girlfriend to Morse in his young Oxford days. There is a scene where Morse, the older Morse takes her to a concert that features Franz Schubert’s exquisite Quintet in C, D. 956. In a latter part Morse invites the woman to his flat and as he prepares all the food he has the Schubert on his sound system.

As I took Hilary and Lauren home I played the Quintet in the car’s sound system. And I told them a short story.

When I was in quinto grado in my school (a bi-lingual American school in Buenos Aires) our teacher read a biography of Schubert in Spanish. She read for 15 minutes every day at the end of the class. I have no memory of my teacher’s (she was a woman) name nor do I remember her features. I remember a droning voice with a clipped Argentine accent that began always thusly, “De la biografía de Franz Schubert, capítulo segundo (o tercero o cuarto)… and she would read to us.

I had no idea who this Franz Schubert was except to vaguely remember he had to do with a city in Austria called Vienna.

And yet, today, September 7, 2013 as I was driving my family home it occurred to me that my anonymous teacher taught me well.