Jo-Ann Sept 2009 - Robson & Granville

There is one aspect of Christmas that in spite of the now 3 years since my Rosemary died that I somehow still do. I like to go to my hugely extensive files and look for stuff that I have probably forgotten or overlooked.

Before the internet I would print photographs in my darkroom that met my eye. Now with the infinite size of space of the internet I look at pictures that I may have overlooked.

That is the case of Jo-Ann on the roof. Jo-Ann posed for me between 2007 and 2009. I called her the Thursday girl as that was the day she often came into my Granville and Robson studio. She had a lovely body and my photographs were records of that body. In few of them did I even attempt to inject any kind of eroticism.

This photograph of her on the roof of my studio was inspired from my knowledge that Edward Weston photographed Tina Modotti nude on the roof of their Mexico City home in the 30s. Why could I  not do this on the roof of my studio?

This photograph, which I have cropped for “community standards” somehow hits me hard. Why?

I wrote about that in this blog (not a bad one at all an worth a couple of emojis) which is titled The Tension is There.

I Wrote 

People interact in real life. It can be wife to husband or friend to friend. I believe that there is an additional interaction when one of the persons is a portrait photographer.

I have written before how a camera can be placed in front of a person and not moved. Then the person’s relatives, partner or would-be partner, the mailman, the teacher snap photographs. Could one figure out who took which photograph?

The Spanish word for taking a portrait is “retratar”. It comes from Latin and it means to draw out, which is close to the modern term now used for taking a photograph which is to capture.

When I take a portrait I like to show what I think the person is like. At the same time the person is thinking of what aspect of their life they want to expose to the photographer. A good photographer can somehow lower the guard of the subject. Sometimes the photographer can be completely surprised by subject as I was when I faced Liv Ullmann and she said to me,"Don't ask me to smile."

 There was aother situation in which I was overwhelmed. In our Thursday lunches at the Railway Club in the past century there was a beautiful blonde woman who always sat alone. We wondered who she was. I took my chances (that could not be done in this century) and went up to her and said,"My name is Alex Waterhouse-Hayward and I would like to photograph you undraped." She looked at me and answered, "When do you want to do this"

She was prompt to appear at my studio. She took all her clothes off. To my horror she had had a mastectomy and had a huge cesarean scar. In this century I would have included all that. In that last century I worked my way around that. I took this one photograph (many other very nice ones) that is one of my favourite images ever.

In my photography classes at the now gone Focal Point on 10^th Avenue I taught a popular course called “The Contemporary Portrait Nude”. There was an exercise I enjoyed doing and exposed my students to. I told them that our model (it could be a man or a woman) was going to stay in one spot and would start with clothes on and finish with none in only five poses. Sometimes I would do that in reverse order. For some of my students who had never done this sort of thing it was a tad challenging.

The model may have posed many times before but the prospect of not taking their clothes immediately sometimes confused them.

That brings me to the photograph of Jo-Ann on the roof.

Would the photograph be seen differently if we knew she was wearing clothes below my crop?

When I look at this photograph I feel the tension within me of the moment of facing her on the roof with nothing on and perhaps also some feelings of vulnerability from her even if she did pose for me unclothed many times.

The photograph is stark and sharp and that adds to the idea of tension. It is not a romantic shot. It records a woman not wearing anything on the roof of a city.

Can one photograph communicate so much?

I can remember one time when I failed miserably. Here it is:  Candice Bergen - My Failure