‘How I wish chaste Artemis would give me a death so soft, and now, so I would not go on in my heart grieving all my life, and longing for love of a husband excellent in every virtue, since he stood out among the Achaians.’ Penelope - Homer (18.202-205)
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| Sandrine Cassini |
Cassini came to my house to pose for the last time before she moved on to dance in Europe and in San Francisco and for a short while at the Victoria Ballet.
She has left such an impression on my soul that every once in a while I seek out her file to see if there is some photograph I might have missed. I found this one. It is in b+w which I took with my Mamiya and it has similar characteristics to a small camera colour version from which I used one for this blog on my mother's red shawl series. Her red shawl was one of the first and here she is. The photograph has a fundamental flaw in that I hid her right hand. This is something I should have never done. But there was something about her look, particularly in profile that reminded me of a patient (but restless?) Penelope suffering from a sexual longing for her departed husband Odysseus to the Trojan War. So I used it anyway and Cassini wrote a delightful little essay to accompany the photograph.
Below is a colour version which I took with a Nikon FM-2 with a roll of President's Choice 800 ISO colour negative film that if improperly scanned and colour corrected the results could rival a badly restored Technicolor movie. And yet...
Below is a colour version which I took with a Nikon FM-2 with a roll of President's Choice 800 ISO colour negative film that if improperly scanned and colour corrected the results could rival a badly restored Technicolor movie. And yet...
