People who might not know first Canadian Poet Laureate, George Bowering might think he is an old grouch. I know him well enough to dispute this. But I must admit that if you say that one plus one is two he will find some way to object.

A few years ago I photographed him wearing my mother’s red shawl. I asked him to write something to accompany the photograph. Here is the blog with his little essay. I should have known that he was going to persist on the idea that my photograph was not of  him.

Photograph and design - Robin Mitchell Cranfield

This year he has published a book of essays called Writing and Reading. It is published by New Star Books. It has the interesting concept that the book begins with short essays and they get longer as you go the next one.

Some months ago (quite a few as I have been thinking about this rebuttal for a while now) a package arrived. My Rosemary asked me if I had purchased a book. I told her I hadn’t. Inside was Writing and Reading. I then threw the box away. My Rosemary is thorough and looked inside and told me that there was a cheque for $100. I wondered until I found on page 28 my photograph (originally in colour) in stark black and white. I read the essay. After reading it I decided to tackle (again) Susan Sontag’s On Photography and Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida.My volume of Barthe's book has been consumed by years of literary silver fish.

I allowed  some time for what I had read to sink in. I used many stickies to mark relevant passages for my rebuttal.

I even wrote this preliminary blog on the subject. And I even wrote another.

But then I came to the conclusion that the serious Mr. Bowering just likes to argue at a time when conversation is pretty well gone. he does it because he has a keen sense of humour.

I will leave it up to those who read this to make up their own minds if my photograph of George Bowering is indeed of him.

But I did find an old blog of mine where I found something that might serve me well in a gentle and well-mannered rebuttal. Here it is. 

The passage in question by Susan Sontag: 

The powers of photography have in effect de-Platonized our understanding of reality, making it less plausible to reflect upon our experience according to the distinction between images and things, between copies and originals. It suited Plato’s derogatory attitude towards images to liken them to shadows – transitory, minimally informative, immaterial, impotent co-presences of the real things which cast them. But the love of photographic images comes from their being material realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever emitted them, potent means for turning the tables on reality – for turning it [in italics in book by author] into a shadow. Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. And just because they are an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy, if there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

Today, 14 August, 2020 Lauren Elizabeth Stewart, 18, is coming to help me clean the house in preparation for my Rosemary’s return from her stay with Alexandra in Lillooet. I will be picking her up (sort of halfway) in Pemberton on Sunday.

I miss Rosemary lots. It is it terrible to sleep alone (not quite as Niño and Niña are there all night like glue) on our big bed now that the pleasure of our satin sheets has faded.

In this terrible pandemic 2020 and an almost terrible century (thanks to Steve Jobs’s iPhone) there are a few things that are better than  from my 20^th century. 

But it would seem that some of these “improved” features of the century have spelled a doom to custom framers. Why put a framed photograph or piece of art on the wall when a flat screen TV is much better?

Those framers (I know) are hurting and in a way I know why. Consider the scanned frame of two pictures of Lauren, wearing my mother’s red shawl. Today I combined them and seized them to fit an antique frame I purchased at Hob Two, a lovely snobbish version of a Sally Ann store on Broadway just a few blocks from our house. It cost $5.00.

Lauren will arrive at 4 and I am sure she will be delighted.

Since this sort of stuff is in my thoughts, I wonder if many years from now she will look at the pictures and remember, “That’s the day I helped Papi clean the fridge.”

In my Vancouver and international career as a magazine photographer I believe I may have had at least 1000 covers.

But amazingly, only twice have I been the subject of the cover.

It was during the 1982 Malvinas (Falkland) War that Vancouver Magazine Editor Malcom Parry pressured me into writing about my experiences in the Argentine Navy. He would take the portrait that appeared on the May 1982 issue.

There were a few difficulties involved. Of my uniform I had kept the collar and the band A.R.A. S. De Marina (Armada Repúplica Argentina – Secretaría de Marina). The Mauser and bayonet came via Mac’s friend Alan Lever from Lever Arms. After much asking around I found a man who collected German uniforms from WWII. My sailor hat was identical (but of plastic not of cloth). Because of the problem of getting a permit to carry a firearm, Mac took the picture at Lever Arms with my RB-67 Pro-S loaded with Ektachrome.

The second time I have appeared on a cover (this time with the company of my Rosemary) is on Kitsbeach Magazine which is distributed in some Kitsilano homes but is impossible to find in a newsstand.

Statistically this has to be my final time on any cover (while I am alive). It feels good. Best of all when Rosemary walks our male cat Niño around a few blocks outside our Kits home many neighbours recognize Niño. When my face was on the cover I remember going to the Eaton’s magazine stand wearing sunglasses since I did not want to be recognized! Should I fit Niño with some?

Above you see the leaf of a Hosta 'Paul's Glory' and a hosta watch I purchased and ultimately forgot about in the end of the 90s in Indiana at a American Hosta Society National Convention.

This blog is particularly relevant because I have been attempting to navigate the "new and improved' Blogger dashboard. Because it was probably designed by Googlelites under 30 their idea of improvement is to make it all much more difficult. They have added all kinds of features I do not want and have made it more difficult for me to go back to old blogs to correct typos.

But I have been helped by the folks of Skunkworks and in particular by Farley Peck.

So here goes.

 Bad Industrial Design in Ascendance

Form does not follow function 

Free Will - Function follows form

Perhaps for me one of the best advances of this century has to be the presence of Wikipedia. It is a good place to start when one is researching a subject or idea. I will convey a startling fact about Wikipedia while not revealing my source. I have a friend in Vancouver who is one of the Wikipedia editors for the entry God.

Form follows function has been in my thoughts these last couple of years as I battle to understand and deal with the so-called improvements of the digital age. It seems that for many designers the idea of improvement involves the addition of unnecessary features which result in a terrible complexification.

On the other hand I could no longer live without a heated toilet seat that does not drop with a thud when one lets it go after practicing my now greatly reduced manly action of doing it standing up. I could no longer live with a car that does not have a rear camera or burn your butt seats.

I believe that form follows function is a term that many of us (or at least this guy) associated with the German movement of the 30s called Bauhaus. I also connected it with the wonderful designs of Raymond Loewy.

When my Rosemary, our two daughters and I arrived in Vancouver in 1975 my first book purchase (from a bookstore then on Granville) was The Random House Dictionary of the English Language – Unabridged Edition. It served me well but as a dictionary it is now obsolete. Or is it if you consider that function may follow form?

The dictionary props up (rather nicely) to eye level my Dell Cathode Ray Tube Monitor.

Form follows function

Form follows function is a principle associated with late 19th and early 20th century architecture and industrial design in general, and it means the shape of a building or object should primarily relate to its intended function or purpose.

Origins of the phrase

The architect Louis Sullivan coined the maxim, although it is often incorrectly attributed to the sculptor Horatio Greenough (1805–1852), whose thinking mostly predates the later functionalist approach to architecture. Greenough's writings were for a long time largely forgotten, and were rediscovered only in the 1930s. In 1947, a selection of his essays was published as Form and Function: Remarks on Art by Horatio Greenough.

Sullivan was Greenough's much younger compatriot, and admired rationalist thinkers such as Thoreau, Emerson, Whitman, and Melville, as well as Greenough himself. In 1896, Sullivan coined the phrase in an article titled The Tall Office Building Artistically Consideredthough he later attributed the core idea to the Roman architect, engineer, and author Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, who first asserted in his book De architectura that a structure must exhibit the three qualities of firmitas, utilitas, venustas – that is, it must be solid, useful, beautiful. Sullivan actually wrote "form ever follows function", but the simpler and less emphatic phrase is more widely remembered. For Sullivan this was distilled wisdom, an aesthetic credo, the single "rule that shall permit of no exception". The full quote is:

Whether it be the sweeping eagle in his flight, or the open apple-blossom, the toiling work-horse, the blithe swan, the branching oak, the winding stream at its base, the drifting clouds, over all the coursing sun, form ever follows function, and this is the law. Where function does not change, form does not change. The granite rocks, the ever-brooding hills, remain for ages; the lightning lives, comes into shape, and dies, in a twinkling.

    It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head, of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law.

Sullivan developed the shape of the tall steel skyscraper in late 19th-century Chicago at a moment in which technology, taste and economic forces converged and made it necessary to break with established styles. If the shape of the building was not going to be chosen out of the old pattern book, something had to determine form, and according to Sullivan it was going to be the purpose of the building. Thus, "form follows function", as opposed to "form follows precedent". Sullivan's assistant Frank Lloyd Wright adopted and professed the same principle in a slightly different form—perhaps because shaking off the old styles gave them more freedom and latitude.