In many Christmas past puttering in my darkroom a few days
before Christmas (if shopping all done) and after the 25th was a
special and most enjoyable pastime.
This Christmas, this 2018 Christmas fills me with lots of
Roman Catholic guilt. It shouldn’t be so easy and so pleasant to cross our cold
and wet patio into my warm oficina. It should not be so nice too look out of
the window as my scanner zips by these three Ektachromes of Virve in her tub.
The Catholic guilt is all about impending doom when I enjoy
a moment of sheer bliss. That cannot go on!
I remember how many times I would clean the sparkplugs (a
Sean Rossiter term for gunning a car onto the Granville Street Bridge) and
enjoy the exhilearation of hearing the V-6 twin turbo of my Maserati. Within
hours or days it would breakdown.
Now I can sift through my very large in quantity files
and look for pictures that at one time would need the mixing of chemicals in my
darkrooms. Of the colour pictures I could do nothing. I had stopped printing
colour negatives and slides by the mid-80s.
Around 1999 I came up with the concept of photographing women
in my tub (or theirs). I had a show with large b+w prints. But I am glad to
notice here that I did take a few in colour in the beginning. Virve my subject
in this threesome was one of my original tests as I tried to find a handle as
to how I was going to take the photographs for the show.
Perhaps I can eliminate from my stress equation this
Catholic guilt. It is fun to scan at random (after making a choice) and waiting
for Rosemary to make (she does not often cook but made the offer now) some tomato
sandwiches.