Annie Leibovitz

 

In late November 1992 I was to face a photographer. I waited in her Vancouver hotel room until she came out fresh from the shower. Her skin glowed but later I noticed she had hangnails. I set up my equipment:

  A Mamiya RB-67 Pro-S

  2. The extremely sharp 140mm macro floating element lens.

  3. A 220 back loaded with Kodak Plus-X rated at 100 ISO.

  4. A Dynalite 800 pack with two heads. One with a grid and the other with a 2x3 ft Chimera soft box.

  5. A Manfrotto Model #055 tripod with the original model Arca Swiss Monoball head.

When I faced the photographer she told me, “This is unreal. It almost seems like I am taking the portrait. Your equipment is like mine.”

I took 12 exposures. This one was the fifth.

Hilary and Alexandra on the Royal Hudson

This afternoon I went to a choral concert at Lord Byng Secondary School. I was invited by my friend Olena and her husband Alex (my tocayo) because their teenage daughter Vasilisa was in the Junior Choir.

My memory of performances in the schools in Mexico City and in Vancouver, where our daughters Alexandra and Hilary went to many years ago, made me melancholic knowing that those moments are in a past that will not return. But I was nicely distracted as the three different choirs sounded professional and not like some of the not so nice school concerts that I can remember.

One of the songs was called The Royal Hudson. As the choir sang they imitated the locomotive and train that used to run in West Van and went to Squamish.

While listening to song with those credible imitations of a locomotive I had a St.Paul-on-the-road-to-Damascus moment.

In the minds of many these days, and especially with photographers and cinematographers, is the real and scary advent of Artificial Intelligence. This blog will be my first one on the subject and in subsequent days I will write another one.

The train song reminded me of going on the Royal Hudson with my Rosemary and daughters Alexandra and Hilary when they were quite small.

As we were moving on an aisle of one of the rail cars that had wooden slat seats painted in multi colours,  I watched our two daughters sit down. The vision was so splendid that I asked Rosemary to lend me her Pentax ME (it was a dog but this time it worked just fine. It was loaded with Kodak colour neg film) and I took one shot of the two girls.

Framed the photograph is on one side of my bed because there is something about the portrait that says something about the innocence of youth, something that I saw in the choirs tonight. There were all these girls and boys looking radiant and good, much like a brand new shoe before it gets scuffed (with the damning experience of adulthood).

I believe that portrait photographs, and particularly family portraits, will never enter the realm of AI. Who will have the knowledge to tell Siri, “Make a photograph of two little sisters wearing straw hats sitting on a multicoloured train seat in British Columbia"?

That will not happen. And if it does I will be in my personal oblivion and will not care.

The world was predictable and a happy one for me until one day around 1969.

It was then that my mother, 58, was suffering a disease called Vertigo Ménière. She had a constant ringing in her ear that was making her deaf and she had terrible bouts of vertigo.

Of vertigo I understood, as from birth, I had an inability to ride in trains, cars, trams without getting dizzy to the point that I would throw up. As a kid I could never ride swings. To this day when I drive I cannot look down without feeling vertigo. And I get dizzy if I am in a car and I am not driving.

My mother from her bed told me, “I am 58, I have no male companionship and no sex, and I believe that the god that exists does not concern himself with our affairs. I have lost my belief in prayer." I was speechless. I did not know how to comfort her.

Three years later she died in bed in the presence of my Rosemary and me.

My Rosemary had a lovely smile but often when I photographed her she put on this sad face. I could never understand it. 

I do now and I will explain how I have come to understand  her.

When we both worked we felt useful and we raised our daughters and in years after we helped educate and take care of our two granddaughters. Sometimes we had two cars and sometimes only one. In our later years I would take her to her office in our large Audi and pick her up in the afternoon when I needed the car for a job. Eventually she retired from her job and stayed home. The same happened to me. Our one car was sufficient. But it was about then when I noticed her sadness.

About five years before she eventually died on 9 December 2020 she would tell me when she was in bed in the morning, “I don’t want to live.” I took this seriously and did everything to cheer her up.

I believe that by then she could see how our immediate family was fragmenting. She was realizing that we were only important to them financially. We were not useful in any other way.

I have been giving a lot of thought, in the last few weeks, to her shocking statement.  And I can explain it.

To not want to live has nothing to do with wanting to die. Rosemary was not suicidal. She was not going to pop sleeping pills.

I am 81, and I mostly skip reading about politics, wars and I despise the social media emojis with their thumbs up and their LOLs. In my head, is the memory of my good friend Abraham Rogatnick who told me a year before he died, “Alex I am not long for this world and I am glad.”

In short I am losing my will to keep on living just like Rosemary’s “I don’t want to live”. I feel that I am no longer useful to my small family and since my Rosemary died my granddaughters don’t call or visit. I get my human affection from my two cats.

I have called friends I had not talked to for years:

Right off the bat, one said, “I don’t read the newspapers as they all hate Trump and I am a conservative."

Another friend I connected with after many years writes in some of my sad blogs, “He is always with you. You are never alone because He is there."

Why cannot people keep their politics and religion to themselves?

Three first cousins, one used obscenities when I mentioned President Kennedy, another sends me Covid conspiracy theory emails, another told me, “I am depressed. If Trump loses we lose our family values.”

Most of my good friends and writers I worked with are dead as are all of my influential mentors.

What keeps me going? It is the knowledge that my almost human, brother and sister cats, would not have anybody take care of them, if I met my oblivion.

And so I wake up in the morning to feed my cats. I bring my breakfast in a tray to bed (Rosemary and I did this for 20 years with the NY Times) in memory of my wife. And then I think, “Do I have to do anything today? No.” And I stay in bed perhaps reading with my two cats on top of me. Before I know it a week has gone by without me knowing what day of the week it is.

To not have to do anything is an existential problem sometimes defined as angst.

Rosemary understood and that is why she did not want to live.

As for me…

Rosa 'Abraham Darby' & right Rosa 'Margaret Merrill' 14 November 2023

Today is November 14 and when I walked into the garden I was surprised to see a couple of roses. One was open the other will probably not open if the cold weather continues.

When I scan my roses (I call them scanographs) I am involved in carefully removing dust spots that are there even if I think my scanner bed is spotless. This detailed work is about the only activity I do on any given day that in the precise moment of doing it I don’t think of my departed Rosemary.

But then when I am finished she is there immediately. With her around I would have shown her the scan and she would have smiled.

But not all I can record here that while our mutually favourite rose was the single Tea Rose, R. ‘Mrs.Oakley Fisher’ she adored R. ‘Margaret Merrill’ and I have always had a preference for ‘the English Rose R. ‘Abraham Darby’ which we purchased in the late 80s and has healthily survived until now.

If anything these roses represent my persistent memory of my departed Rosemary.

I am including in this blog the coincidental arrival of two holiday catalogues that Rosemary and I always enjoyed perusing as we often found gifts for our daughters and granddaughters. With the advent of my granddaughters no longer being children I will probably give cash to them and my daughters. While Rosemary would have agreed, she would have understood the passing of better and rosier times with our family.