La perfección es una pulida colección de errores.

Perfection is a polished collection of errors.

Mario Benedetti

I read an obituary in the NYTimes a week ago for American photographer Jerry Uelsmann who died on April 4. Now for the last few days I have been inspired  to do these negative sandwiches which I have explained in the three links below.

Uelsmann Inspired 

My Excitment and the Smell of Metal 

El mosquitero por tercera vez 

My grandmother often told me when I complained that I was bored (besides telling me to suck on my elbow), that “Nadie te quita lo bailado,” which does not translate too well into English. What it means is that nobody can take away from you the good moments you have had in the past.

Not too many might now that just in my negatives files, behind me as I write, I have a four-drawer metal filing cabinet that contains around 600 different women that I have photographed in my past. This does not include my new digital files with the women that have posed for me with my Fuji X-E1 and X-E3 cameras.

But such is my excitement of working on these double negative scans, that I now have come to understand that those dances that I danced in the past I can now dance all over again in a new way.

Part of this excitement is my realization that one of the luckiest moments in my photographic life has been my 30-year photographic relationship with Tarren Rae. She is not only beautiful. There is a womanly sensuality in her that defies any other women I have ever photographed. When my friend former Vancouver Magazine rock critic Les Wiseman met Rae around 1980, he told me she reminded him of Vivien Leigh.

With Rae I learned to shoot bodyscapes (I thought these were mundane activities until she posed in my studio), and portraits of all kinds. She made me the good photographer I think I am today. She had and has patience for this bumbling photographer I have often been when I have faced her behind my camera.

I remembered Uruguayan writer/poet Mario Benedetti’s definition of perfection which fits so well with my activities relating to my negative sandwiches.

Tarren Rae is about as close I have ever been in contact to that female perfection that other women strive for.

In the collection of photographs here, the second one from the top, represents a blunder, and yet, it is beautiful. Because film has always been expensive, I attempted many times to get more than 36 exposures from a roll of film by loading my camera in the dark and getting that first exposure before the first exposure. Below is one of the exposures found in the sandwich three down from the top. This was the first time that I added a hosta leaf in a portrait. That session prefigured a show I had a few years later featuring a woman and assorted hosta leaves.

 

 Yes, Tarren Rae is perfection in spite of my blunders. Benedetti would have agreed.