Dreaming in Ektachrome
Wednesday, December 25, 2019
One of the
most enjoyable features of that past century that was the 20th was
the importance of journalism. It was for me an era where a dream one night
could be a reality a month later. Why a month? This was because I was a gainfully
employed magazine photographer in Vancouver and in many cases in the rest of
Canada and beyond. You pitched a story at the beginning of the month and if you were lucky you would see it in print by the end of it,
My writing
cohort, Les Wiseman (began as a writer of rock music for Vancouver Magazine in a
column called In One Ear and finished as associate editor before moving on to
teach journalism) and I liked to watch the marvelous local stripper scene in
many pubs in the city. Wiseman imbibed beer and I drank expensive soda water.
Looking
back at that scene from this different century it all seems quaint and, clean.
The local bars were run like ships and you could lick the floors. This all of
course was happening, as yet no man could sit at his computer with a beer on the
side and look at pornography. Not that any of the strippers Wiseman and I liked
where anywhere close to representing any association with that ugly word.
Another interesting
feature about our local exotic dancer scene was that the women involved
realized how important it was to choose their music. Some were daring in
dancing to Lou Reed or to tunes by local pop or punk bands.
Samantha,
who you see here, liked to dance to Roxy Music’s Avalon. She had a perfectly voluptuous
body that somehow was paradoxically slim and elegant. Her face could have launched many ships
to their eventual destruction. But it was her very long hair that was her piece
de resistance. It was long enough to reach beyond her waist. She would somehow sway
that hair, much in the same way as a cat can control its tail. Without any
clothes her hair was her most important item of clothing.
The
photograph you see here is a Kodak Ektachrome. I took this one and others and
was well paid for them. Wiseman and I went to Vancouver Magazine Editor Malcolm
Parry with the idea that Wiseman explained more or less in this way, “We want to do an article on the stripping
scene in Vancouver from the business side of it.”
And so it
was. And this Ektachrome somehow reflects for me an age when it was all less
complicated and dreams came true.
Kodachrome
Kodachrome
