I can go to a slide show of old and perhaps deal with 50 projections of roses. I might be able to handle the same amount of street shots. My tolerance level decreases if the projections are fireworks, city scapes (at night or day) and no more than 10 slides of caverns.

But I can look at portraits all day and I will never tire of taking them. Here is Holly Suicide (AKA Daniella Ciccone) fanning herself.

To get this look I scan the b+w negative (a 6x7cm one) as if it were a colour negative. The Epson includes that orange mask of all colour negatives.  Then by abusing the shadow/highlight tool of my 13-year-old Photoshop with a bit of contrast tweaking you get what you see here.

Holly Suicide by the bay window.

Holly Suicide (AKA Daniella Ciccone) was a young woman who was a habitué of the Smilin’ Buddha Cabaret on West Hastings, not far from Main. It was the best place to see and listen to very loud punk bands. It was there where I first saw Art Bergmann and his K-Tels, 50% Off and The Wankers just to mention a few.

I befriended Holly and I was able to photograph her twice. For the first session (the picture you see here) she was living at an old building (it is still there) on West Georgia and Bute. It had bay windows and I took these pictures using the beautiful window lighting.

Holly Suicide in Red

This past Wednesday February 14 I attended the opening of Carmen Aguirre’s Broken Tailbone at the Historic Theatre of the Vancouver East Cultural Centre.

This 80 minute performance featuring Carmen Aguirre as La Jefa and Pedro Chamale as the the DJ El Jefecito was directed by Brian Quirt.

If you were not a 75-year-old failed Argentine Tango dancer and arthritic grandfather (me), you would have emerged as a pretty competent salsa, cumbia, candombe, bugaloo, merengue (and more) dancer of that diverse music called música tropical in my Latin America.

The dance lessons came with a message. While Aguirre and Chamale may have been smiling the message was a serious one.

If you did not understand any Spanish you might have missed the several moments when Aguirre painfully paid homage to her Uncle Nelson, a man of strict political ethics who squandered (perhaps?) a life with alcohol and cigarettes.

While younger than this man, Aguirre is a product of the last century, a century that was less politically correct. For anybody present on Wednesday you would instantly know that Aguirre likes her men unabashedly and honestly. In fact some of the Spanish swearing (lots of it of  the Argentine variety) made me blush and to find out how it was that she broke her tailbone (this happens at the end of the show) was as off-colour as the night could get!

Beneath this beautiful, curvy woman with big black eyes there is a lot more.  She is what we in Latin America call a “militante”. This is a person who has sound beliefs (beliefs of which Aguirre was willing to forgo her own safety and life many times) on what they consider to be the only valid social structure. This social structure is a leftist leaning one. In Latin America there has been a long list of right-wing dictators and military dictatorships that killed and disappeared many. And of course, Aguirre reminded us of lots of instances in which entities like the United Fruit Company and shadow versions of the CIA meddled in bringing down governments or training the Bolivian troops that placed Che Guevara on that infamous slab in the mountain town of Vallegrande.

While Aguirre and family might have escaped the clutches of the Pinochet regime in Chile to find refuge in Canada, the fact is that Aguirre and her mother went back to Chile (and Argentina and Bolivia) to practice what was pleasantly preached in song and dance this last Wednesday.

With Isabel Allende

In 2013 I was one of the judges for the BC Non-Fiction prize. I was sent 100 books which I was supposed to read in under two months. One of them was Aguirre’s Something Fierce - Memoirs of a Revolutionary Daughter.

I left reading it to the bitter end suspecting the account would be an angry and depressing one. I was completely wrong! The story was full of humour and some of the passages (we know Aguirre likes men) made me blush.

At perhaps a half a century of existence Aguirre may have reached a period of her militancy where she might be pondering on a poem of Uruguayan Cristina Peri Rossi from her works State of Exile:

Courage

I said to you:

“One needs a lot of courage

for so much useless death.”

You thought I was referring to Latin America.

No, I was talking

About dying in bed,

In a great city,

At eighty  or ninety years old.

In Julio Cortázar’s story Reunión in which the narrator is Che Guevara, after a bloody landing in a Cuban island, Che under a tree and friend Luís recall:

I stayed with Luís leaning on the trunk of a tree, smoking and looking at the drawings of the leaves against the sky and we told each other of all that had happened to us since our landing, but above all we talked about the future, of what was going to begin on the day when we would have to transfer from the rifle to the office with telephones, from the sierra to the city…

My translation

I am sure that the ever fruitful Aguirre will find a solution to all that. And she will thoroughly entertain us while at it.

One of my memories of Carmen Aguirre is indelible. In February of 1999 at the Stanley Theatre, Carmen Aguirre played Frida Kahlo in Susan Astley and Steve Petch's Tribute to Frida Kahlo. Aguirre was Kahlo. Another memory is Aguirre's modification of a Julio Cortázar story "Las Reglas del Juego" into a play that I saw at Studio 58 (her alma matter).

Homage to Tío Nelson

Uxmal

In our recent trip to Mérida, Yucatán we went to the Mayan ruins of Uxmal. With Rosemary it was our second time. I had been there before on my own in the late 70s.

When in any of the Mayan ruins of Yucatán I feel the presence of explorers and archaeologists who have been there before. They would have arrived on horse or mule back through spiny land in terrible dry heat or rain in the rainy season.

It is perhaps impossible to record with a camera images that are really original. It has all been done before. This was in particular by French traveler and explorer Joseph Desiré Charnay who took some of the first photographs at Uxmal. He did this between 1857 and 1886. He was inspired by the work of John Stephens and Frederick Catherwood.

Palenque and Rebecca heats up 
Palenque and beetles again 
Palenque in my mind

I have some friends who write this sort of stuff:

I went to see the Isle of Dogs. It was great.

Two presidential busts of JFK arrived  in the mail and he isn’t even an interesting president.

People seem to have opinions. They voice them but they don’t qualify their statements. I do not understand.

Or:

I was at Starbucks this afternoon.

I want to ask, “Why were you at Starbucks? Was it memorable? Who did you have coffee with? “

One of the photographs illustrating this blog was one I meant to take and did. The circumstances that allowed me to shoot it are not likely to occur in this 21^st century ( I no longer teach). Two of my favourite models were hired by the now defunct Focal Point Photography School on 10^th Avenue for one of my classes. 

While my students were taking photographs (following my instructions) I noticed the bare feet and the patent leather shoes. My only regret is that I did not give the photograph more of an exposure so I could notice detail on the shoe on the right. The shoe on the left was too close to the edge. With Photoshop I have added more.

The other shot was an accident. All the photographs on that one roll of film I took with a Canon Pellix (I have used it only once). It was given to me by Abraham Rogatnick’s lawyer after Rogatnick died.

One of the maxims of photography is to never use a new camera or one you are unfamiliar with on a job. Luckily I was not on a job. Before the shoots with the two models I went to a tea shop across the street from the school. I was not too sure how to load the camera. I tried several times. Somehow when I snapped a couple of shots (in the tea shop and at my table) so as to advance the film in the just loaded camera there was an unintended double exposure which I really like. It was an accident. 

For me the shoes and the bare feet have enough information to intrigue. But there is not enough information to figure it out. Why are those two women there? I find the uncertainty erotic. 

I have explained and qualified why I like the two photographs I took with that vintage Canon Pellix.