Saturday, October 17, 2020

 

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.

The maple wears a gayer scarf,
The field a scarlet gown.
Lest I should be old-fashioned,
I'll put a trinket on. 

Emily Dickinson

In scanograph above:  Rosa 'Complicata' hips, top left Rosa 'Abraham Darby', centre Rosa 'Princess Alexandra of Kent' and below Rosa 'Shropshire Lad' 17 October 2020

Because I lived in Argentina during my formative years, my perception of the seasons has always been reversed. Christmas day in Buenos Aires was usually the warmest day of summer.

Then in Mexico the seasons were really two, one was a rainy one and the other was a dry. It has only been in these 45years in Vancouver where I am finally (!) settling to the idea of the Canadian seasons.

But the problem persists as the concept of Thanksgiving (the harvest side of it is important) and Halloween is alien (still so!) to me. While I love squash soup but my Rosemary does not, I do not care for anything related to the pumpkin or the turkey.

Fall in our Kitsilano garden for me (Rosemary is silent about this) is one of watching the inevitable deterioration of our plants as they bid us goodbye until next year. So hope is in the air and this is all but forgotten in the dark, rainy and cold Vancouver winters. Hope returns in the spring.

Because I am an old man and I know that a new pair of shoes will sooner or later get a scuff or that a new car will be inevitably bashed somewhere, I have come to appreciate the handsomeness of plants (not taking into consideration fall leaves) as they decline. Some of my hostas are lovely with their yellowing and the unopened buds of some of my English Roses look just fine to me.

Our Rosa ‘Complicata’ (formerly complicata) is now a virtual tree and it is full of rose hips. Some are blackened as they are past their prime. And randomly there is plenty of “unsightly” black spot.

I like the idea of scanning these rose hips with three of my most faithful roses at this time of the year. They are Rosa ‘Abraham Darby’, Rosa ‘Princess Alexandra of Kent’ and Rosa ‘Shropshire Lad’.

I have no idea if my Buenos Aires-born father had a love for roses. I do know that my grandfather Harry and grandmother Ellen were both born in Manchester. I love the fact that I was able to find this lovely essay on fall from a 19^th Century Manchester Guardian.

 

From the archive, 11 November 1840: The gentle melancholy of autumn

There is an "even-tide" in the year - a season when the sun withdraws his propitious light - when the winds arise, and the leaves fall, and nature around us seems to sink into decay. It is said to be the season of melancholy; and if by this word be meant that it is the time of solemn and serious thought, it is undoubtedly the season of melancholy; yet it is a melancholy so soothing, so gentle in its approach, and so prophetic in its influence, that they who have known it feel, as if instinctively, that it is the doing of God.

A few days ago, and the summer of the year was grateful, and every element was filled with life, and the sun of heaven seemed to glory in his ascendant. He is now enfeebled in his power; the desert no more "blossoms like the rose;" the song of joy is no more heard among the branches; and the earth is strewed with that foliage which once bespoke the magnificence of summer. Whatever may be the passions which society has awakened, we pause amid this apparent desolation of nature. We sit down in the lodge "of the wayfaring man in the wilderness," and we feel that all we witness is the emblem of our own fate. Such, in a few years, will be our own condition. The blossoms of our spring, the pride of our summer, will fade into decay; and the pulse that now beats high, with virtuous or with vicious desire, will gradually sink, and then must stop for ever.

When the winds of autumn sigh around us, their voice speaks not to us only, but to our kind; and the lesson they teach us is not that we alone decay, but that such also is the fate of all the generations of man.

In such a sentiment there is a kind of sublimity mingled with its melancholy; our tears fall, but they fall not for ourselves; and, although the train of our thoughts may have begun with the selfishness of our own concerns, we feel that, by the ministry of some mysterious power, they end in awakening our concern for every being that lives. Yet a few years, and all that now bless, or all that now convulse humanity, will also have perished. The mightiest pageantry of life will pass, the loudest notes of triumph or of conquest will be silent in the grave; the wicked, wherever active, "will cease from troubling," and the weary, wherever suffering, "will be at rest."

Under an impression so profound, we feel our own hearts better. The cares, the animosities, the hatreds, which society may have engendered, sink unperceived from our bosoms. In the general desolation of nature, we feel the littleness of our own passions; we look forward to that kindred evening which time must bring to all; we anticipate the graves of those we hate, as of those we love. Every unkind passion falls with the leaves that fall around us; and we return slowly to our homes and to the society which surrounds us, with the wish only to enlighten or to bless them.

Let, then, the young go out, under the descending sun of the year, into the fields of nature. Their hearts are now ardent with hope; and in the long perspective which is before them, their imagination creates a world where all may be enjoyed. While they see the yearly desolation of nature, let them see it as the emblem of mortal hope; while they feel the disproportion between the powers they possess, and the time they are to be employed, let them carry their ambitious eye beyond the world.

More Emily Dickinson 

If you were coming in the fall 

 Purple Haze 

Yellow she affords 
A sepal, petal and a thorn
Her breast is fit for pearls  
I would not paint a picture
November left then clambered up
You cannot make remembrance grow
November
the maple wears a gayer scarf 
We turn not older with years, but older
Now I am ready to go

 A melancholy of a waning summer
Just as green and as white
It's full as opera
I cannot dance upon my Toes
a door just opened on the street 
Amber slips away
Sleep
When August burning low
Pink Small and punctual
A slash of blue
I cannot dance upon my toes
Ah little rose
For hold them, blue to blue

 

Friday, October 16, 2020

 

Linda Lorenzo

We had a short visit by our eldest daughter Ale (she lives in Lillooet)  this weekend but she left today because a storm is happening  tomorrow and the curvy road between Pemberton and Lillooet can be dangerous.

Because Ale has a teaching seniority she now goes to school three times a week and teaches art in the primary school. I asked her how old her oldest are. When she said 12 I told her, “I want to lend you this August Sander book which I think you can use in a class with that bunch.” 

Sander photographed the professions in Germany in the last century. He even had a pauper. All portraits (few exceptions) are full length taken outside. There is something about these portraits, a quality where you instantly think, “This man respected the people he photographed for their humanity.”

My idea is that these kids should go home and take pictures of their mother not as their mother but as a woman who is the mother, a mother ideal. Of their pet cat they would take a portrait of the cat in its catness.

In the late 50s in my Roman Catholic boarding school, St. Ed’s in Austin, Texas we liked to get our religion (really theology) teacher BrotherEdwin Reggio, C.S.C. off track and we thought we would waste time by asking him questions. I am sure the Brother Edwin knew well of our intentions and used these situations to his (and subsequently to our) advantage. One day we asked him, “Did Hitler and Judas go to hell?”

He did not answer immediately but told us that every human born enters the world with what he called “an inherent dignity”. The fact that all of them were born (he circumvented the idea that God had chosen each one) with it means that no matter how they then live their life for good or evil, this does not take away that dignity. He then finished by telling us, “I don’t know if those two went to hell.”

With all the shenanigans happening in politics in the USA and in my own, also polarized Argentina, I understand that the concept of dealing with each other knowing of this mutual dignity has somehow been lost.

In all my years of taking portraits of people for magazines, annual reports, brochures, etc and for myself, I always have within me the words of Brother Edwin and a vision of those marvellous photographs that August Sander took so many years ago.

Here you have the lovely Linda Lorenzo, full of poise showing us some of this stuff we first heard from the Brother of the Congregation of Holy Cross.

Thursday, October 15, 2020

 

Linda Lorenzo - scanned negative

 El mismo perro con un diferente collar.

Paradoxically for me, the digital innovations of this century offer so many possibilities and choices that I feel like being inside the Indigo bookstore on Granville and Broadway in Vancouver. I see so much stuff (besides books) that I yearn for Macleod’s Books on West Pender or any Buenos Aires bookstore. They only have books.

 

Scanned darkroom print

 

I have been unable to convince my contemporaries that while anything you shoot with a digital camera can be converted to b+w, high contrast, low contrast, etc. the variations are still from the same shot. When I shoot with m Fuji X-E3 I like to also use a Nikon FM-2 and a Mamiya RB-67 with film. While the photographs, perhaps taken at about the same time may look similar they are intrinsically different.

And then there are the variations shown here. They are all one snap of Linda Lorenzo loaded with a very fast Ilford Delta 3200ISO film with my Mamiya using the available light of my former studio. I will explain how each one was done. 

 

Scanned negative with opaque plastic under the negative.

 

Scanned frame from contact sheet

Wednesday, October 14, 2020

 

Echinacea purpurea - 14 October 2020

While a day of sun in our fall Vancouver may cheer me up a tad I cannot think but by the Indigenous Canadian idea (and in many other countries, too) that in the fall we reflect on the concept of surviving one more winter to live for a spring day. When you are 78 like me, thinking perhaps that my Rosemary might be a widow soon I get satisfaction in enjoying the colours of our hosta leaves as they fade and decay into that temporary oblivion of all perennials. I also love the look of flowers like in these Echinacea that are definitely past their prime but somehow surprise me with a sober elegance as they bid me goodbye.

 

And Emily Dickinson gets the idea of missing somebody in the fall. I tell Rosemary every day if we will be alive to travel when we can travel. I miss my Argentine family and the sweltering heat (I love heat) of our favourite Mérida in Yucatán. Will all that happen? The doubt in Dickinson’s poem feels right.

 

If you were coming in the Fall,

I'd brush the Summer by

With half a smile, and half a spurn,

As Housewives do, a Fly.

 

If I could see you in a year,

I'd wind the months in balls---

And put them each in separate Drawers,

For fear the numbers fuse---

 

If only Centuries, delayed,

I'd count them on my Hand,

Subtracting, til my fingers dropped

Into Van Dieman's Land,

 

If certain, when this life was out---

That yours and mine, should be

I'd toss it yonder, like a Rind,

And take Eternity---

 

But, now, uncertain of the length

Of this, that is between,

It goads me, like the Goblin Bee---

That will not state--- its sting.

 

 More Emily Dickinson
  

Purple Haze 

Yellow she affords 
A sepal, petal and a thorn
Her breast is fit for pearls  
I would not paint a picture
November left then clambered up
You cannot make remembrance grow
November
the maple wears a gayer scarf 
We turn not older with years, but older
Now I am ready to go

 A melancholy of a waning summer
Just as green and as white
It's full as opera
I cannot dance upon my Toes
a door just opened on the street 
Amber slips away
Sleep
When August burning low
Pink Small and punctual
A slash of blue
I cannot dance upon my toes
Ah little rose
For hold them, blue to blue