This is going to be a gentle rant so please be forewarned.
Because my father left our house in Buenos Aires when I was
8 and my mother was a high school teacher working hard to make ends meet, my
grandmother Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena was the great influence of my life.
It was only around 1969 when she returned from a trip to Egypt that I finally
lost touch with her. She had advanced dementia and did not recognize me.
She raised me in a surprisingly modern way. She never told
me, “Alex don’t do that.” Her way was, “Alex, if you do that, this is what is
going to happen.” She somehow knew all the advice on record in Cervantes’s Don
Quixote uttered by Sancho Panza. To this day, I too remember most of the advice
that came my way via the ultimate Spanish novel.
But what most stays in my mind is that this woman, who was an
artist, defended me from all kinds of punishment by pointing out, that I, too, was
an artist. I cannot remember when she and I would have been at odds and when I
might have lost respect for her or considered her to be an old woman with no
relevant information that could make my life better.
Perhaps it was the old school dictum that you had to respect
your elders because they were so.
The picture you see here I took in September 28 of this year. I can see in the picture influence and experience that began in 1962. How is that?
In 1962 my artist friend Robert Hijar and I were attending Mexico
City College in Mexico City. Since he was in the art department he had access
to the college dark room. It was in that darkroom (while Robert played StanGetz/Eddie Sauter’s album Focus on his reel to reel), that I would place my
negatives into the enlarger and figure multiple ways of cropping the
photograph.
It was not until I started shooting for Vancouver Magazine
in 1977 that I learned that art directors were the boss and that they could do
anything with my photographs. It was then that I learned to crop my photographs
in camera and have all that was important there. Cropping the picture (and I
shot both vertical and horizontal versions) would eliminate important and
necessary parts and take away the relevance of the image. Art directors rarely cropped my photographs. They had little choice.
It was around 1977 that my Rosemary said, “Alex you are
never going to learn to print colour negatives and colour slides. This Monday
you start a colour course at Ampro Photo Workshops on West Broadway." Thus I
learned to print and to note the difference between photographic blue and
photographic cyan or the difference between yellow and green. In colour correction these colours can trick one.
That information, thanks to my Rosemary, helps me in this 21st
century to colour balance both my scans of my film negatives and slides but also
of my digital pictures.
It was at Vancouver Magazine that excellent and inspiring
art directors (not to mention the editor) pushed me to shoot beyond the established parameters. There
always had to be a different way of shooting the cliché. To this day I will not
shoot anything without finding some roundabout way of making it different.
My contemporaries, who shoot digital, use a system which creates
huge files called RAW files. They tell me that with these files a lot can be
done to correct minor and even major mistakes of exposure.
The magazines of the last century expected all colour
photographs to be taken with slide film. Slide film has a low tolerance for
exposure mistakes (the technical term is latitude). Once you overexposed an
assignment, and before scanners and Photoshop were around, you threw the slides
away and started from scratch. This taught all magazine photographer to be
precise in exposure.
Then the automatic cameras happened. The reason these early
automatic cameras worked so well is that photographers used colour negative
film which had a very good latitude for exposure mistakes. They were the RAW of
the past.
The picture that illustrates this blog came about from
seeing in Vancouver countless extremely sharp dance pictures everywhere. In
frozen motion, motion is not noticed. It is the blur that suggests motion. I
learned the technique of using shutter speed of 1/5, 1/8, ¼ and even ½ second
attending Sunday performances of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company.
After learning to dance the Argentine Tango some years ago I
gave myself a magazine-type assignment. How could I shoot tango in a different
way? This is what I did.
So on September 28 in the evening at Lavalle and Florida in
Buenos Aires where a dance troupe performs every evening I decided I was going
to only shoot their legs.
And this I did, proving that this picture began its creation
sometime in 1962 on the highway from Mexico City to Toluca.
And yes experience and age do sometimes add a bit of
excellence.