In this 2020 I have vowed to get rid of stuff. This is difficult, particularly with my photo files which are very large.

Today lawyers were on my agenda for the trash. Singleton Urquart, followed Thorstensen’s and a few more law firms that I photographed in the 90s. In order to take my equipment downtown  purchased a municipal plate that allowed me to load or unload in loading zones or back alleys for 30 minutes. I had a dolly that helped me move the stuff to the buildings and up the elevators.

There were other firms I worked for.  One in particular Roberston Pick was an ad agency that specialized in real estate and I believe built homes. Most of Roberston Pick went to my oficina trash basket. There was one envelope that included b+w negatives and an 8x10 print with fixer stains as the Ilford plastic coated paper of the 90s was not archival. The envelope is titled Cinderella and I have no memory of the assignment or who the little girl was. The date on the fax is 1994. This would make the little girl be in her 30s.

I wonder who she was? She will survive in my files. The little girl is now in the Cs as Cinderella.

Olena, January 22 2020 - Rollei Infrared Film

I am not sure if I can see myself inside a circled wagon situation that old American West of film or in that 1964 Cy Endfield film Zulu depicting the Battle of Rorke's Drift between the British Army and the Zulus in January 1879, during the Anglo-Zulu War. It depicts 150 British soldiers, many of whom were sick and wounded patients in a field hospital, who successfully held off a force of 4,000 Zulu warriors.

Most of my mentors are gone. I have four first cousins left and all their parents (my uncles and aunts) are all dead. My American classmates from my years in a boarding school in Austin, Texas are dead or unreachable.

A very good friend who some years ago moved to Memphis and we suffered a bit of distancing I called up a few months ago. I called him to apologize and he told me that he had one of his daughters visiting and that he would call me. He has not. His phone is no longer in service. His tweets and Facebook postings are at least 8 years old. Is he dead?

Here in Vancouver former friends like Associate Vancouver Magazine Editor Don Stanley cannot be reached. He ditched his landline and does not participate in any social media. Is he dead? The last time I saw him he rang the bell at our former Kerrisdale home and handed me an annotated version of Nabokov’s Lolita. If I were to find him he would represent one of the few that I know who reads and with whom I could discuss my plan to read Julio Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch) in both Spanish and English this month.

The few people that may know me when I run into them in the street they invariably ask me, “Are you still…” It would seem that a photographer has to stop clicking while writers can continue to write and lawyers to practice law.

Many of the few of my contemporaries are happy to shoot sunsets or night cityscapes with their smart phones and will write in their social media postings, “Shot with my iPhone10 without a filter. Isn’t it amazing?” Most would understand and know that modern phones have built-in programming that includes those filters not used.

Olena, January 22 2020 Fuji X-E3

I have found the delights of using an iPhone3G (without aSIM card). It has a look that when properly used produces results that cannot be readily mimicked by “better” phones or by resorting to Photoshop. My argument to the latter is that you have to see an iPhone3G image before you can imitate it with your advanced Photoshop.

Recently (just a few days ago) I presented a local darkroom club with a personal take (via Powerpoint) on the now discontinued Kodak Black & White Infrared Film. Because I wanted to be thorough I tested a Rollei brand film called infrared that really isn’t so the club members could decide.

In testing that film I discovered a film with an extended red sensitivity that when mated to a deep red filter in the front of my camera produced extremely clean and luminous skin. And best of all when this film is overexposed it shows an aura or halo around portraits and body that looks much like the Kodak film. This is because my friend, Portland baroque bassist, Curtis Daily who came for this weekend’s lecture found out that the Rollei film does not have an anti-halation coating (just like that Kodak film).

I am excited and I will soon buy rolls of this film in 35mm and 120 format. I must repeat, “I am excited.”

What person in my tightened circle can I share this with? - Nobody. My contemporaries have long abandoned film. They might even attempt to convince me that an MP3 file listened through earbuds is much more immediate and wonderful than my CDS played through my JBL Studio Monitors.

The colour picture you see here of Olena is a deliberate and massive underexposure with my Fuji X-E3 digital camera. I take these calculated errors with a magical f-stop, f-7.1. And here there is another of what I call the f-7.1 effect!

Some of my contemporaries would look at the photograph and the effect and say, “If you shot RAW and not JPGs you would not have those problems.” It seems that they are blind to anything that is not conventionally sharp.

Arbolito Cubano
Tango en Carmesí 
Melancolía
Tango Sobrio 
Tango excelencia 
Diós apenas toca el arpa
Voleos
Carlos Gavito

In many respects it is good to live in a third-world country. Consider my native Argentina and its cosmopolitan Buenos Aires.

In the 60s when I was living there I would tell my friends from Mexico and the United States that Argentina was one of the first countries in Latin America where women were using the brand new contraceptive pill in spite of their, in some cases, extreme allegiance to the Roman Catholic church.

It was Juan Domingo Perón in the early 50s who ushered in the idea that Industria Argentina could compete with imported products. I remember avoiding anything with that on the label in those 50s, desiring always to secure a bootleg pair of Levis and Double Bubble chewing gum to go with them.

Eventually Argentine manufacturers saw the light and produced wonderful leather and wool products. The wine industry became important. Perón attempted (a futile gesture) to build an Argentine car and fighter jet. But their atomic power research did in the end produce viable reactors. If they wanted my Argentina could build an atom bomb.

It is this kind of protectionism that is now so much in vogue in the rest of the world.

Argentina is still a third-world country with massive problems in the national debt and a political polarization the rivals that of the United States.

But in our last trip to Argentina last September I did note some of the advantages. In any evening there are hundreds of bookstores open. The newspapers are still relevant, although newsstands now carry toys, lapel pins and football club T-shirts.

The transport system in Buenos Aires is first class. Only my wealthy relatives, the O’Reilly’s boast that they have not been on a train, bus or subway in more than 30 years.

But there is one item, a throwback to that last century that keeps me smiling when I visit my native city. This is that while Argentine women are as feminist as any in other countries (they have their own Me-too movement and a woman vice president who at one time was president) they have not lost their sense of elegance which their sex represents (I am reluctant to use the word I wanted to use, femininity).

The Argentine tango is perhaps the last remnant (besides fly fishing) where a man can boast that he is in control. There is an active movement in the Argentine tango society trying to change that. Anybody who has danced the tango knows the man leads and that the woman (her job is much more difficult) has to be in a constant moment of unbalance where she must anticipate what the man will do but not entirely as she cannot lead. There is a tradition of men and women across a dance floor and how it is the man who indicates he may want to dance with her.

My proof of all of this is my new friend Guillermina Van Der Linden, who taught in an Amsterdam university until she visited Buenos Aires, fell in love with tango and stayed. She speaks several languages and dresses elegantly at all times. She has the presence of a woman who in other countries might make a successful entry into acting. Her partner José Carlos Romero Vedía makes a quiet foil for Van Der Linden’s sensual elegance. They dance and fit perfectly.

Imagine this man being able to easily lure the couple to pose for me in one of the ballrooms of our Hotel Claridge, a block away from where Van Der Linden and Romero Vedía dance every day on the corner of Florida and Lavalle. Rosemary skillfully assisted me in the session.

My photographs were successful. But there was more. Romero Vedía offered to take some pictures of Van Der Linden with this photographer. I was thrilled!

I wonder how the folks in my now first world country of Canada and my city Vancouver opine of these Galaxy 5 photographs?

There is this curious fact. Vancouver might have E-scooters soon. They have been available in downtown Buenos Aires since last July.

In 1966/67 as a conscript sailor in the Argentine Navy in Buenos Aires I was an aide and translator for the Senior US Naval Advisor, Capt. USN Onofrio Salvia. I refused to carry an order (to show up very early to do some translations)) to an Argentine Lieutenant Commander. He told me that in a time of war I would have been shot or sent to Antarctica where the only females would have been penguins. I was given a week’s arrest in the brig. 

I had enough time to walk to Pigmalion Bookstore on Calle Corrientes (Borges patronized it) and purchased Dag Hammarskjöld’s Markings (Faber and Faber- 1964) translated into English by Leif Sjöberg and W.H. Auden. In it I read:

He was a member of the crew on Columbus’ caravel – he kept wondering whether he would get back to his home village in time to succeed the old shoemaker before anybody else could grab the job.

Since then I have always tried to look ahead at possibilities and to take chances. I have looked back enough in 2019. This 2020 is one of many possibilities.

And if I am where I am today, in more or less pretty good health, and with no financial worries, it is all because my Rosemary never ever did look back.