In my 30s and 40s when old people died they did so because they were old.

Now at 75 my reference point is different. Just reading about Philip Roth dying a few days ago at 85 tells me that if I am lucky I may have 10 more years. Time has compressed and those 10 will seem short once I am in my death bed (if unlucky) or if I am vaporized while flying in a hypersonic Air Canada airplane of the future that explodes in mid-air.

I have extensive film and digital files of women (mostly undraped) that I have photographed since the late 70s. I always felt uncomfortable in showing my pictures to friends or relatives. This was not so bad when pictures to be shown had to be either prints or projected slides. The digital age has changed all that.

Around 2000 I became friends with Argentine painters Nora Patrich and Juan Manuel Sánchez (they were living in my Vancouver then). From the two I realized that I was an artist and not just a competent magazine photographer. It was Sánchez who egged me on.

Sanchez in the 60s protested the Argentine military dictatorships within an institution of well-known artists in a group called Grupo Espartaco. They used murals to protest peacefully the goings on of the generals. By the year 2000 Sánchez had settled into his favourite subject, the nude woman.

A painting of a nude woman is much more palatable to the conservatives in art who would consider a nude photographic female much more in your face.

But Sánchez taught me to ignore all that and to soldier on. From him it all seemed like what he was doing and what I was doing was perfectly natural.

To Sánchez a blank canvas was a problem to be resolved. Once he finished his painting (almost always a nude) he had found his “resolución”. Through the years until his death in Buenos Aires two years ago, his paintings and their resolutions became simpler. I asked him once if one day he would paint a dot on a large canvas and call that the essential (as in a Plato essence) resolution of a woman. His quick answer was, “¡Sí!”

My situation is similar. My photographs of undraped women are now not as frequent as before. My subjects are hard to find. But when I manage to find a willing one, I am searching for erotic subtlety and elegance. My reference has always been that 20^th century man that Helmut Newton was. He had elegance and subtlety in his photographs.

And so I take pictures that have fewer elements as it would seem I am headed into Sánchez territory.

These days as I slumber in our bed before I succumb to the “baile de las sábanas blancas” as my mother called going to bed to sleep I am thinking of my joint show with my friend Argentine artist Nora Patrich at the Galería Vermeer on Thursday September 20 in Buenos Aires.

She is going to show some of her stuff, I will show some of mine and we will also display some collaborative (colaboraciónes) work. Embedded in that show will be not only the superlative Argentine presence of Linda Lorenzo (whose pictures you see here) but the memory and almost-live presence of our departed friend and artist Juan Manuel Sánchez who inspired us all for an artistic look at our nostalgia for Buenos Aires.

 San Telmo ("Saint Pedro González Telmo") is the oldest barrio (neighborhood) of Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is a well-preserved area of the Argentine metropolis and is characterized by its colonial buildings. Cafes, tango parlors and antique shops line the cobblestone streets, which are often filled with artists and dancers. A street named the "Illuminated Block" is where many of these important historical buildings can be found.

San Telmo's attractions include old churches (e.g. San Pedro Telmo), museums, antique stores and a semi-permanent antique fair (Feria de Antigüedades) in the main public square, Plaza Dorrego. Tango-related activities for both locals and tourists are in the area.

Wikipedia

In our last trip to Buenos Aires in 2017 I made it a custom to return to the old barrio of San Telmo on a Sunday. There are many Americans there and I have the suspicion that they are looking for SS/Hitler memorabilia among the wears displayed in the antiques market.

There is a store there that is dedicated to the Argentine caramel called “dulce de leche”. Rosemary and I enjoyed a dulce de leche ice-cream and we purchased some jars of San Ignacio Dulce de Leche which we deem to be the best.

At one of the “puestos” I spotted an old box camera. I haggled with the man and bought it for about ten Dollars. What was surprising about this German-made camera which used 120 format film (taking pictures that are 6x9 cms) was that there was roll of film in it. I was curious and promptly forgot about it.

A week ago while suffering the doldrums of extended rainy and grey days I wondered about the film.

I carefully wound the film back. When I took it out it was Kodak Verichrome which I know to have been a b+w film introduced around 1912.

 Of the camera I looked it up and found this:

Kathleen Young had a heart attack in our kitchen. She lay on the floor for a day before she was found still alive. In 1986 we bought her house and she was moved to a home in Ontario.

In the beginning I thought her garden was her turf and Rosemary and I were reluctant to change anything. We would discover plants and try to figure out why Mrs. Young had chosen them or why she had placed them in that particular spot. After about a year I could almost say I knew a bit about her because of her garden. To me she was a ghost and I would somehow walk through her as I mowed the lawn or planted a rose.

Eventually her presence faded and the garden became our own. We radically changed it and removed lots of lawn and added new flower beds.

Two years ago we left our fine corner house and garden. We moved some of the plants to the large garden our eldest daughter Ale has in Lillooet. We brought some plants to our Kits duplex. We told some friends to help themselves. I could not watch as they dug up some of my roses, shrubs and hostas. A few plants went to the UBC Botanical Garden.

I believe in ghosts. 

Somehow there is something of Rosemary and this her husband in those plants at UBC. I look at some of my Gallicas in Lillooet with a bit of a smile but I keep my melancholy at my loss inside.

A few weeks ago we went to the old house. It is still there but the garden is almost gone. An excavator was brought in to level the place and the circular mound where I had my roses (it was a sunny spot) is flat. Nothing is growing. Our water heater is still in the middle of the walk. It has been there for almost a year.

When we moved to that house we could feel the presence (or at least I did since I believe in ghosts). When the house is finally torn down nobody will know the history of the almost 100 year-old house. At least five of our cats are buried there.  If there is a new garden will the owners walk through us? Will their pets sense our dead cats and the racoons that lived in the thuja?

By then we might even be ghosts here in Kits.

The photograph here of Virve Reid to me seems like an apparition of a young Kathleen Young. She is a ghostly apparition who must have not approved of our changes at first. 

In the end the Kathleen Young who lived into her 90s must have known that her garden was ours but hers, too.

Today, May 7 2018 I looked out of my living room window and saw the first rose to open in our garden. The rose that has first opened in our garden has never been the same one. Rosa ‘Jacqueline du Pré’ in spite of being in shade most of the day has officially opened the rose season in the garden.

I moved a few weeks ago a very strange looking rhododendron. It is Rhododendron macrosepalum ‘Linearifolium’. It has very tiny lanceolate leaves and even smaller flowers. It has to be protected. We purchased it many years in Seattle. I believe that I have finally found a perfect spot for this un-rhododendron.

Rhododendron macrosepalum 'Linearifolium' May 6 2018