Aja's Back & the Memory of Hot Summer Sand
Monday, October 08, 2018
Since the man with the orange hair was elected south of the
49th parallel, my Rosemary and I have not had a normal life. The
first thing I do very early in the morning (sometimes 5:30) I check on CNN in
my Samsung to see what has transpired since the evening before. More and more I
don’t wait for my NY Times to crash on the front door at 6:30 in the morning. I
use the phone around 10 the previous evening to read the editorials.
The only relief from the madness happened in September when
we were in Buenos Aires for two weeks. With spotty WiFi we simply did not want
to know what was going on in the Northern Hemisphere.
When Rosemary and I with our two daughters arrived in
Vancouver in 1975 I did not get work as a photographer immediately. I did not
even understand at the time that there was such a profession as that of a
magazine photographer. And so I worked first washing cars at Tilden-Rent-A-Car
and then as a counter clerk. On some of my days off, in the sunny days of
summer I became an avid enthusiast of Wreck Beach, Vancouver’s clothing optional
beach.
I was not to know at the time that the photography of
undraped women and men would in many ways help me to overcome my shyness and
give me an edge in magazine and even in annual reports. The edge came from my
continuous pressing of my camera shutters and the experimentation with
different films (Kodak Special Order 410 and 115 and Kodak Black & White
Infrared film, three examples).
With my two young daughters, not at Wreck, I shot slide film
and had it processed as colour negative film with startling results. Without
knowing I was developing what now would be known as a cutting edge style and
approach.
At the same time as our Vancouver fall inexorably shifts to
the cold and rain of winter I have been looking at the pictures I took so many
years ago (1978 perhaps?) of Aja. I remembered her recently when I found some
of her pictures and wrote this blog.
It seems and I don’t know quite the connection but in my
pictures of her at Wreck Beach my files mark her as a friend of Richard Bond.
Bond was a handsome but very thin hairdresser with a healthy/natural eating
habit but who smoked a very expensive brand of American cigarettes called Sherman's. For a while
he cut both Rosemary and my hair until his hours of operation being in the late
evenings finally made us look elsewhere. The bathtub shots of Aja I do remember
in that I took them in the bathroom of my writer friend Mark Budgen (who never
did go to Wreck Beach). It would thus seem that in our small city Aja happened
to know both men for different reasons.
Aja & statically moving towards death
Aja & statically moving towards death
In what may be either a concerted effort on my part to avoid
very intimate parts of a woman or simply the idea of telling myself, “I am
going to concentrate on Aja’s lovely back and just do that,” That’s what my
three rolls of b+w film represent.
One of the rolls was Kodak Black and White Infrared Film
and the other two Kodak Special Order 410.
This second film was targeted by Kodak to be used scientifically to
photograph solar flares. But as soon as photographers understood that the film
had an extra sensitivity to red they (and yours truly) immediately realized its
capability for portraiture and figure photography. Its sensitivity to red made
it render anything red in a lighter shade. This made skin luminous (much like
the similarly red sensitive but coarser grained infrared film) and skin
imperfections simply disappeared. The paradox though was that the film was
extremely sharp so some skin imperfections like stretch marks would be in
evidence.
Working with this film helped me learn what was later to be my guide
in editorial photography which was to make people as good as they looked and
when possible better. In an era before Photoshop (and airbrush artists were
expensive and hard to find) taking photographs that did not need too much
fixing was a plus for any photographer trying to get paying work.
As I look at these pictures of Aja I remember how angry
Rosemary would be with the fact that I was, “Wasting my day on the beach,” when
I could be doing something more productive like looking for work.
The job at Tilden was the short of shift work that meant
that if my days off one week were on Monday and Tuesday, the next would be Wednesday
and Thursday. This gave me few weekends with my family. We tried to keep a
pattern of having breakfast and dinner at the table with the whole family.
Eventually my magazine and annual report work kept me very busy
and slowly my trips to Wreck Beach diminished. At some point the idea of
spending all day attempting to get a suntan became something that was
irrational and stupid. I do remember that in those days Kodak marketed
Ektachrome film that came with a built-in sun tan for portraiture. In those
days a tan was a healthy look.
Now when I shoot undraped creatures of the opposite sex I
glory at skin that never sees much of the sun.
But it is difficult not to look at these pictures of Aja and
not imagine the feel of the hot sand under my feet and the casual approach of instructing
her to move a tad to the left or the right. And in a world before digital the
idea of driving home and wondering what the latent images on my exposed film
would be like.
Yes, it is drizzling outside. But the warmth of my oficina
heater and the look of these pictures almost take away the arthritis pains of
this old man.
