I doesn’t matter how much I adopt the technical advantages of this 21st century I feel firmly that I am a product of that last 20th century.
A relative of mine in San Francisco posted this:
How many communion wafers must I eat to eat a complete Jesus?
I immediately informed him that his United States of America and much of the world has become polarized between political extremes and more importantly a respect for human dignity and just plain manners have been forgotten. So I did that wonderful Facebook “snooze”. I will not see that sort of thing again for 30 days.
A Baby Album & a Black Dial Phone
While I was raised to be a Roman Catholic and received a very good liberal one at an Austin, Texas boarding school, St. Edward’s I will not put here any information of what I believe at my age of 79.
It would seem that the Roman Catholic Church is fair game for a terrible utterance as seen above. Other faiths might not take it and stride and might just take that remark a tad more violently.
As an Argie coming from a country that has almost 50% inflation and 6 out of 10 children are living in poverty I am glad that Argentina has Messi and the Pope.
All the above is but a prelude to something that is more dear to my soul. The pictures you see here, placed in the order of the Holt Renfrew album (made in Italy!) they are in, I took in 1977 when Hilary Anne Waterhouse-Hayward Stewart was 6 years old.
Nineteen seventy seven was an important year for me. On a Friday, my Rosemary told me, “Alex on Monday you are starting a course at Ampro Photo Workshops on colour printing. You have been complaining that you do not know how. You will now.” And so I learned to print colour negatives in that Burnaby basement of ours.It taught me how to colour balance and, now in this century, I am able to perfectly correct my colour negatives, slides and digital captures quickly without using those terrible and inaccurate auto correct buttons.
These prints represent some of the first photographs I printed myself and I do believe that after 44 years they look pretty good.
I took the photographs at a school on Cambie and 12th Avenue
that was for gifted kids, and at Queen Elizabeth Park. The photo of the Hilary
holding on to the birch tree I remember taking on Burnaby Mountain. I can see
the influence of Rosemary as Hilary is holding flowers in some of the
photographs. The woven hat I still have in my closet. I took the photographs with a Pentax Spotmatic-F. If you look closely I used a soft focus filter in only one of the photographs.
An album, so I found out, contains the word that means white. The combination thus is about a book that is a blank book into which you put stuff.
Hilary had this album at home and she brought it back the other day as I told her I was going to do something with it.
Looking at the photographs I smile but it saddens me to know that those happy days in that other century, when things were simpler and less complicated, will not return. The album, an obsolete one like its creator (me), is one of those items of that past century that will now be replaced by sexy exterior hard drives, or even worse, digital oblivion.
