Ophelia - John William Waterhouse - 1894

Courtenay - 5 October 2022

“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”

American philosopher George Santayana

That above quote is often repeated but I feel that there is another way of looking at it particularly in the arts. To ignore the art, architecture, theatre, music, sculpture and dance of the past means that it is difficult to be inspired in the present.

Consider the Pre-Raphaelites.  I did not know too much about them but I was aware of the existence of one John William Waterhouse as I admired his painting of Ophelia drowning. But in this 21^{st century} one can find instant satisfaction in information at one’s fingertips thanks to Wikipedia:

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (later known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and art critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner who formed a seven-member "Brotherhood" modelled in part on the Nazarene movement.[1] The Brotherhood was only ever a loose association and their principles were shared by other artists of the time, including Ford Madox Brown, Arthur Hughes and Marie Spartali Stillman. Later followers of the principles of the Brotherhood included Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and John William Waterhouse.

The group sought a return to the abundant detail, intense colours and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian art. They rejected what they regarded as the mechanistic approach first adopted by Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. The Brotherhood believed the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art, hence the name "Pre-Raphaelite". In particular, the group objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts, whom they called "Sir Sloshua". To the Pre-Raphaelites, according to William Michael Rossetti, "sloshy" meant "anything lax or scamped in the process of painting ... and hence ... any thing or person of a commonplace or conventional kind".[ The group associated their work with John Ruskin, an English critic whose influences were driven by his religious background. Christian themes were abundant.

The group continued to accept the concepts of history painting and mimesis, imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art. The Pre-Raphaelites defined themselves as a reform movement, created a distinct name for their form of art, and published a periodical, The Germ, to promote their ideas. The group's debates were recorded in the Pre-Raphaelite Journal. The Brotherhood separated after almost five years.

If you go further into Wikipedia you will find out that the Pre-Raphaelites had a favourite muse the red-haired Jane Morris who was married to William Morris of Arts & Crafts fame.

I know that John William Waterhouse was born in Rome where his English painter parents lived at the time. They then all moved to London. Since my grandfather William Waterhouse Hayward was born in Manchester I doubt I may be related to John William. That did not prevent me from exercising my own interpretation of his drowning Ophelia with my own must Courtenay.

For me one of the failings of contemporary photography is that photographers have no pushy magazine art directors to send them back for re-shoots and to insist on somehow working in a different way. 

When I had my chance to photograph Canadian author Robertson Davies I tried many things. One involved my inspiration in my youth (I may have been 9) when I was obsessed with Leonardo and I remember sketching a copy of his very red self-portrait with pastels. 

Many years later, I was assigned by the Globe and Mail to photograph Vancouver artist Rodney Graham. Graham had his studio on the same floor as I did on the now gone corner building on Granville and Robson. I knew he had (behind his serious expression made all the more serious by his round rimless glasses) a keen and very dry sense of humour. At the UBC Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery Graham had a programmed piano that was playing a Wagner composition that would take 27, 000 years. On the walls of the gallery there were rectangles containing that one not the piano would play every few minutes. Graham and I conspired to rip off    the famous 1946 photograph of Stravinsky by Arnold Newman. At the time the Globe and Mail had an excellent art department. I asked them to respect my crop of my portrait so that it would resemble Newman’s. I am happy to report that they did!

In the late 80s I admired the complicated lighting of Hollywood actors and actresses in the 40s by photographers like George Hurrell. I went on a long rampage of taking photograph inspired by Hurrell and others.

Karen Campbell

While I may have had a show in the late 90s of women in bathtubs when I thought of my Ophelia  suicide drowning re-interpretation I knew there was another way. In Courtenay’s not too well lit bathroom my Fuji X-E3 set at 3200 ISO gave me photographs with very little loss of detail. 

Madeleine Morris

Inspiration from art of the past means that I am nicely doomed to repeat it.    

The orange rose in my Ophelia picture is this one.                                                                                   

Liv Ullmann - June 1990

In my Gaston Bachelard type of daydreaming and thinking that Joan Didion did write:

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. – Why I Write (essay originally published in the New York Times Book Review in 1976)

 Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant - Joan Didion

my thoughts took me to this realization that perhaps over 80% of the people that I have known or know  I have photographed.

As a child I never photographed my father but when I returned to Buenos Aires in 1966 I photographed him three times. I have the negatives. Strangely of our conversations I remember nothing. What kind of block could this have been?

The average person who is not a portrait photographer, when they remember somebody, is it about when they first met or the last time they saw each other? Or a combination of both?

In my case I am trying to sort out that, with while combining the person facing my camera. I only met Liv Ullman once so I remember her about our short conversation and the picture I took of her. My other “memories” of her would be about my reading her lovely autobiography and of her films.

In the case of my family and particularly my daughters, granddaughters and my Rosemary, my memories are compound based on photographs and the actual fact of living with them.

For many years my idea of what portraiture is has been that of the person facing my camera, known or unknown. That person wants to project to me what they think they are in relation to themselves and to the me, the photographer facing them. In my case my intent is to capture (in the old sense of the word before that word was taken over by the digital photographers) the essence of who they are that I am able to observe. Or that I draw out through conversation and combined with my research of them if I did not know them until the moment of taking their portrait.

I once played with the idea of placing a camera and one light in front of a person and instructing the person not to move. I would then bring in to the room, one at a time, father, mother, siblings, lover, husband, wife, the mailman, etc. My feeling is that we would be able to guess the photographer by the subject’s expression.

All these photographs would be facets of the person. If I were to feed a computer with all those photographs would the computer then spit out an image that represented the person in their entirety?

While all the above is simple conjecture I cannot get over the fact that so many of the people I have known (and photographed) are now dead because I am now 80.

Is a portrait photographer in some way unique in this realization?

The acute loss and peril of the portrait photographer

I am not pregnant but…

During my four years at St. Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas I learned to eat Korean War-surplus powdered eggs for breakfast (with lots of ketchup), okra, black-eyed peas and suffered eating pre-boiled steaks.

As a luxury, I had little spending money, I would sometimes walk the two miles to the nearby Twin Oaks Shopping Mall in the stifling Texas heat to buy sliced  Kraft Swiss Cheese. I would consume most of it on my way back.

As an Argentine born cheese connoisseur, I would have told the folks at Kraft that in Argentina we would have labeled the cheese as "queso TIPO suizo" as it was not imported from Switzerland .

Now living alone with two cats and missing my Rosemary I occasionally get these uncontrollable desires to eat a particular kind of food or candy.

Tonight I went to my Kits Safeway just to buy this sliced Armstrong Swiss Cheese. It tastes exactly like that old Twin Oaks Kraft Swiss Cheese.

After I finish this blog and post it you can guess exactly what I am going to do next.

While eating it I will remember those moments of my youth in what is now the bat capital of the United States.