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| Tannia |
In this blog I wrote about the most serious putdown I have
ever received as a human being.
For the years as a Vancouver magazine photographer I knew
that because of the hefty competition I could not rest on my laurels. I had to
come up with new ideas and new techniques. And most important was the
realization that if I made a single mistake I would not be re-hired. Perhaps
Ana Victoria in Oaxaca was right that I was a human trying to be a machine like
my camera.
Now in this 21st century there is a longing for
the simpler times, times that were slow (at least for those who remember that
rosy past) and in photography there is a film and film camera comeback. This is
good as we must take advantage of all the methods that are open for us in
photography. But sometimes I believe that there is so much emphasis on the type
of camera, the kind of film used and experiments with unusual methods of
developing it, that one can forget the inherent possibility of the quality of
an image if it is the result of cerebral (machine-like?) thought.
Many years ago as I was struggling to find ways of taking
photographs of women that went along with 20th century mindset
called “glamour” I photographed Tannia. She was also the first to pose for me
in the best room of the Marble Arch Hotel in which I began to explore my ideas
of the eroticism of taking pictures of a beautiful woman in a seedy hotel.
In one of those preliminary photographs of Tannia I inadvertently
took one double exposure. My Mamiya RB-67 had an almost foolproof device to
prevent such uncontrolled exposures to happen.
But happen it did to my delight
(only a recent delight that I have noticed).
Perhaps it has all to do with the fact that as a retired
perfectionist magazine photographer I have fallen into that comfortable niche
of thinking that I am an artist.
As for Tannia, I am now aware how much she must have
suffered in my bumbling. But she taught me lots with her patience.