I read in bed today in my NY Times while having my strong mug of tea and munching on my cheese bread toast (that Rosemary burned) that folks who purchased clothes from Land’s End were incensed at having been sent as a gift a copy of the latest GQ Magazine that features model Emily Ratajkowski not wearing much but not revealing any of the serious parts.

It was sometime around 2006 (I started this blog in January of 2006) that I found out that somehow my eager subscribers from the UBC Botanical web site had severed connections due to the somewhat racy stuff that occasionally appears on these pages. That severing has happened with other organizations and I know a few acquaintances who refuse to contribute to my blog because of this racy content.

I find it hard to reconcile this in the age of easily available (and free) pornography.

My definition of pornography is something done in bad taste. I have tried taking pornographic photographs but always a little controlling valve in my brain (good taste valve?) steps in and my pictures end up not being pornographic (as I see it).

As a much younger man the offers (in person, by telephone and by writing) of beautiful women who wanted to pose for me. The usual roundabout procedure was to tell me that they were not satisfied by their Sooter’s Studio pictures. My files are voluptuously straining from their metal confines.

But as I get older the new entries are far and far between. Perhaps it has to do to with my age. In Spanish I might be perceived as a viejo verde. Or we might be riding a new wave of puritanical sensibilities.

This is a sorry state of affairs as I feel that my photographic interpretation of eroticism is at its best simply because it comes from a mind that is detached from a body with no warranty.

But I persist in my self-censorship standards and today’s photographs will offend nobody, except perhaps some Canadian customers of Land’s End.

In yesterday’s Corte y Confección (a Spanish expression for the art of fashion tailoring) I playfully worked with some beautiful b+w negatives of my friend Kathryn which I cropped and eliminated the bits.

In today’s sequel I took pictures from a contact sheet of Kathryn where modern digital GPS camera technology would tell you that an image (the one on the left) was taken in a studio on the second floor of the Farmer Building (now gone) on Robson and Granville. The second picture (which I took of just those lovely legs) would be revealed to have been taken in UBC’s Endowment Lands. 

My camera was a Nikon FM-2 and the film was Kodak TMZ 3200 ISO processed in dilution B of Kodak’s HC-110.