These days I begin my blogs with “now that I am 80”, a lot.

If you consider that I started my life without a telephone or a refrigerator and used a fountain pen in my school you can understand that I am old faded crust.

Kathie Fernandez, Scott Rumble, Leslie Dala, Neil craighead & Robin Driedeger

Such is the level of change in this century that while I am amazed (and I adopt some the changes) I am also affected in a forlorn way.

What makes writing a blog a sad affair this April 8, 2023, is that when I started it in January 2006 I had no idea what a blog was. I quickly removed the ability for folks to comment. There were many nasty people then.

In 2006 the blog was a popular diversion and social media had not yet emerged in full force. After a while I realized that my blog was a sort of “dear diary” and I put lots of personal feelings into it. Now the much more savvy digital generation are not savvy enough to realize that my blog is on my web page and that what I put into Facebook and Twitter is not my blog but a link with a photograph. The savvy folk believe that if I do not “post” into social media I have not blogged.

In whatever way you look at all the above I am consciously aware that what I write is a bit more than a “dear diary”. I try my best not to rant or to place here my political or religious beliefs.

I was raised as a Roman Catholic and educated by my very Roman Catholic grandmother. I was sent to a Catholic boarding school, St. Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas from 1958 to 1961.

Except for Holy Orders, Matrimony and Extreme Unction I received all the other sacraments. My theology teacher Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. taught us that the almost forgotten but important sacrament is Confirmation. This sacrament make one a soldier of Christ, not in the sense of swords and guns, but at being able to explain Catholic Doctrine to anybody who may ask. I was taught well and I can do this with efficiency.

At this age all I will reveal about my faith is that when my Rosemary was about to die on 9 December 2020 we both knew we would never meet again.

I wonder how many people today would be shocked as I was when in Buenos Aires, in April 8, 1966 when I was sitting on a bench of the Buenos Aires zoo in my summer Argentine Navy conscript whites I was reading the Is God Dead? Time Magazine article with that cover I will never forget?

On Good Friday (Viernes Santo) my grandmother would call me into the house around 1:30 in the afternoon. I was 8. I remember that she, my mother and I would kneel and Abuelita would recite Jesus’ seven words from the cross. I was not allowed to listen to the radio.

I would define that day as a sombre and solmemn day. Some of that remains. For me today is not at all a happy day.

It is a day that I use to reflect on how I got here and wonder where I am headed in what is left of my life.

The anticipation of Easter Sunday after a Viernes Santo and a Sábado de Gloria is a happy one in which the plants of my garden represent to me a resurrection, a coming back of my perennials. It is also sadly a happy anticipation clouded by the loss of my Rosemary and that I cannot share the garden with her except in memory.

Today Holy Saturday I received a kind invitation to attend the Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis at the Orpheum by Leslie Dala. I turned down his original invite telling him I did not have the heart to go alone. He insisted so I was accompanied by his wife Rosalind (red hair!). After the concert we indulged in that lovely Vancouver tradition of going through that always unlocked door on stage right and go backstage where we greeted Dala and the singers.

All in all Sábado de Gloria was not all that somber. Why?

I went to GardenWorks on Lougheed earlier in the day to buy several  Hosta ‘Sunny Halcyon’.  This, usually blue and extremely elegant hosta  as Hosta ‘Halcyon’ put a smile on my face in spite of the rain. In hosta lingo H. 'Halcyon' sported into H. 'Sunny Halcyon'.

Ever since I was 8 I was obsessed with an interest in anything related to Leonardo da Vinci. I remember getting some pastels as a gift for my birthday. I started by copying a red da Vinci self-portrait. 

Many years later, on November 1994, I had the opportunity to photograph Robertson Davies. I took advantage of his look and beard to rip off my own da Vinci.

For years I have used the works of artists and photographers as inspiration for my photographs.

Looking at the past to defy the present

Tonight, as I was not quite sleepy enough, and having this now three-week long obsession to use my scanner as a camera, I wondered what would happen if I scanned my 1958-purchased first camera, a Pentacon-F, with some sort of negative on the back on the film plane with with back open. 

Blog with links to all my weeks-long  obsession of scanner as camera.

My subject, sometime around 1977, was a red haired Canadian Pacific stewardess (that’s what they were called then) who was wearing a lovely blue dress. The camera I used was the Pentacon in this scan.

After a few faulty efforts I think I was able to get a fair result. I then thought it would be nice to mate the scan with a good reproduction of her and place them here side by side.

As I was ready to write this blog I stared at my combination and realized that here I have my own version of La Gioconda!

General Don José de San Martin, Pancho Villa & Emiliano Zapata

Pancho Villa & Emiliano Zapata circa 1914 - Photo by Agustin V. Casasola

 It is difficult to decide where one is from when one has lived in many places.It depende on the day and my mood.

I was born in Buenos Aires in 1942, moved to Mexico City in 153, moved to Nueva Rosita, Coahuila in 1957, in 1958 spent four years at a boarding school in Austin, Texas. I returned to Mexico City. In 1964 I went to Buenos Aires to do my military service in the Argentine Navy. In 1967 I returned to Veraceruz. That year I met my Rosemary in Mexico City. We were married in Coyoacan in 1968. With our two daughters we lived in Arboledas, Estado de México. In 1975 we drove to Vancouver in our VW. I have lived here since.

My daughters Ale and Hilary just returned from Huatulco, Oaxaca and brought me a fabulous T-shirt with Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa on the front and on the back.

Incredibly the shirt brought me memories of an Argentine general of the 19^th century, General Don José de San Martín.

These three men have something in common that has been rare for hundreds of years. Around 1914 Villa and Zapata took Mexico City. Agustín V. Casasola photographed the pair sitting in the presidential room of the government palace in the Zócalo. After the photograph the two went home.

José de San Martín, liberated what would become Argentina from the Spaniards, with O’Higgins he did the same in Chile (crossing the Andes with heavy canon in a feat comparable to the one by Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants). From there he and his army were ferried by Lord Cochran to Callao in Peru and he liberated it. 

He had a meeting with Simón Bolivar (nobody knows what they talked about) and from there he took a ship to Boulonge-sur-Mer. He lived there until his death and his body, only then, was returned to Argentina.

When I was 8 in Buenos Aires, I was in the second grade. Early in the year we were all given a lovely book/pamphlet called El Legado de San Martín. The general had died August 17 1850 so the book celebrated his 100^th anniversary of his death. 

It is impossible for me to forget 1950 as we were instructed to write on the top right hand side of all our notebooks and our deberes (homework) 1950 – Año del Libertador General San Martín.

I find it astounding that 73 years later I still have the legado. 

On page 27 his XLVIII memory states (below)  & (my translation)

"I promise and swear in name of the independence of my motherland to never exceed my present military rank, nor to obtain public employment, and I will renounce my present military rank the moment in which all our people in America no longer have enemies."

My country of Argentina has suffered over 100% inflation in 2022 and there are many poor people and a reduced middle class. The two political parties are at each other’s throats. The blue dollar (black market dollar) since Rosemary and I went to BA in 219 has gone up from 164 pesos to now almost 400.

There is one place I always go to when I visit Buenos Aires. I go to the Metropolitan Cathedral on Plaza de Mayo and enter the general’s mausoleum that is always guarded by two tall Granaderos the San Martín. In all the many years that I have entered that cathedral nothing has changed inside. It is the only place with stability in the whole country.

 This is why I celebrate Villa, Zapata and San Martín. Thinking about them gives me a measure of stability in these unsettled times.

In the last century (and I have written about this before) we had the cutting edge technology that was the fax machine. In this century it is a forgotten item of equipment used by some lawyers, doctors and London Drugs.

I believe that one can use old technology by re-inventing it. In that last 20^th century the scanner revolutionized the magazine and newspaper industry. Photographs were scanned. That bit the dust with the advent of digital cameras. Digital files could be emailed and reproduced or printed.

I have on the left of my office desk an Epson Perfection V700 Photo Scanner. With it I scan my negatives, slides, family photographs and since 2001 I have amassed more than 3000 “scanographs” of the flowers and plants of my garden.

Scanographs

Then I realized that I could use my scanner as a photograph. There is a link to all the blogs related to this discovery below.

A Swivelling View

But there is more. I have a hint of it here Zemblanity  Deterioration - the bad and the good

But  in this blog, now in all its sharp glory, is the scanner reproduction of a small 35mm frame on a contact sheet that because I may have not used fresh fixer in the darkroom or the simple fact that Ilford Ilfospeed plastic coated photographic paper was not archival. Look in the above link Zemblanity.

I have scanned the print of the digital file that I printed and there is no noticeable decline in sharpness.

I love hybrid technology that mates the old with the new. Unfortunately that does not apply to me as I am old statistically and I will soon be sharing oblivion with fax machines.

In the 80s and 90s in Vancouver we had magazines and newspapers. The writers who worked for them were called journalists. Some of them who did not hold a steady job were called free-lance journalists or writers. I was a free-lance magazine photographer. Sometimes we defined ourselves as editorial photographers.

This field for both free-lance writers and photographers was in Vancouver very competitive. You had to pitch interesting and unusual story ideas to editors. As a photographer I often made the rounds not only in Vancouver but in Toronto and New York with something that was called a portfolio.

Art directors, sometimes called design directors liked to be vowed by new stuff. This is why I have a large collection of cameras of which some are these two unusual swivel lens panoramics.

My first purchase was the Japanese Widelux. Later I bought the Russian Horizont (both use 35mm film. I also have a very large Noblex 175 that produces a negative that is 7 inches long.

Much has been discussed about the true difference between a wide angle lens camera and these swivel lens cameras. I believe that the swivel lens units are the closest to human vision in that you see what is in front of you but there is that peripheral vision on the left and on the right.

The 35 mm Widelux and Horizont have a flaw. Because the lens has to start from the standstill sometimes you get a stutter. The only solution (for me at least) is to have them serviced regularly by our Vancouver treasure, camera repairman Horst Wenzel.

Horst Wenzel

Another flaw of the Widelux (the Horizont, touch wood, not yet) is that there is a pulley inside made of rubberized plastic that wears out. Nobody anywhere in the world can deal with replacing the pulley. Except of course Wenzel!  On a miniature lathe he works on a hockey puck. My Widelux has that intimate Canadian connection!

Of late I have discovered that with fewer people wanting me to photograph them and the fact that I do not feel like going out into the street to “document” telephone poles, there is a solution that is now keeping me excited and busy. I use my scanner as a camera.

My Two Swords Excalibur 

Smiles at the Sylvia Hotel 

A Scanner - a burst of inspiratio

Nostalgia with a scanner 

Nostalgia and Association

In the Widelux picture in today’s blog the double appearance of C in my print happened because I did not load the camera correctly. It is a lucky mistake. I took the Widelux to Wenzel and told him he had not repaired it well. I was soon told that I was wrong. He showed me how I had missed one of the rollers when I loaded the camera.

What this means is that thanks to Wenzel I can now repeat this lovely mistake.