George Tidball - Circa late 70s

Ten more blogs and will have reached 6000
 

In spite of my advanced age I have a very good memory, for names, places and useless facts.

I believe I know when waiters (that’s what they were called in Vancouver in the 70s) when they began to use that one verb after serving your food, “Enjoy”.

While George Tidball started his Keg ‘n Cleaver in 1971 on Lonsdale in 1971 by the mid 70s when we arrived to Vancouver from Mexico City there was a Keg in Burnaby near us.

We loved to go there because Rosemary loved the salad bar and I enjoyed the synthetic bacon bits I put on my salad servings.

Racquet Ball was the sport du jouer and we could watch players at it from our tables.

Today 5 January I wanted to write an upbeat and random blog. I went into my files titled Taconite/Soriano and I saw the Tidball, George file. I took it out as a week ago I invited my daughter Hilary to dine at the Burnaby Keg. We reminisced with smiles but sadly discussed how Rosemary never ate a big steak. In Mexico City they said she ate like a “pajarito”, or little bird.

Being in the restaurant we knew we were but a few blocks from our first home when we came from Mexico. It was on Springer Avenue very close to Lougheed Highway.

It was there where I noticed three strange customs/ideas about Canadians. We had made friends with a couple from our BMO Bank. I asked Rosemary, “We are being invited for after-dinner drinks. What’s that?”

My daughters had a friend called Moira who lived in our townhouse complex. We invited her often for dinner. What was strange to me was that when our daughters were in Moira’s house in late afternoon they would send them back when they were going to have supper.

I remember well that on Saturday evenings when we were invited to a party (that does not happen anymore) we would get into our Mexican VW and I would instantly turn on the radio knowing that CBC had a program called Our Native Land and played Indian (then) Indigenous music. I would look at Rosemary and tell her, “This is your music, you are a Canadian (I was still an Argie)." Rosemary would frown and would tell me to turn it off.

Unfortunately, with her gone, she cannot enjoy, as I enjoy, CBC’s Reclaimed that plays a varied mix of very interesting Indigenous music.

Being with Hilary at the Keg some 43 years later felt odd as we looked around but enjoying our steaks (feeling guilty because of all my vegan friends).

I did notice that:

1. There was no salad bar.

2. No racquet sports being played.

3. And our server never said, “Enjoy”.

I wonder what George Tidball make of the proceedings.

Laura Faye from Peoria,Illinois, September 1983 in Las Vegas

Today is 6 January in which I personally celebrate the Epiphany? Why? Read here.

My Epiphany

I thought that I could write something that would be positive and the fact that at my age of 81 I can still wonder with delight at things.

I took this photograph of Linda Faye, from Peoria, Illinois in 1983 in Las Vegas at the first (and last) stripper convention called The Golden G-Strings Award.

I took many photographs including of the winner that happened to be my friend Tarren from Vancouver.

There is something that always makes me return to this photograph. It is not perfect. On the left you can see the back of another woman. And yet there is a poise and elegance in this woman that amazes me every time I look at it.

I know her name because my photograph was used in the Chicago Sun Times and she is named.

After I came back from Mexico City in October I wrote this blog of my inspiration to take street photographs there inspired by my respect for the work of German photographer August Sander. He photographed all the professions of his country for 50 years from beggars to Jews in 1938 you know would not live much longer. His primary talent was his respect for the humanity of his subjects.

August Sander - Mexico City

Strippers in Vancouver were called exotic dancers and they were differentiated from the term burlesque dancers, as the Vancouver variety took all their clothes off. There is a term I rather like – ecdysiast.

Coined by writer and editor H.L. Mencken in 1940, from ecdysis (shedding or molting), from Greek ekdysis (casting off), from ek- (out) + dyein (to put on).

For quite a few years, beginning around 1978, I photographed often the Vancouver strippers. Many often cite men as mentors as the original mentor named Mentor taught Odysseus’s son Telemachus.

For me, mentors can be from all sexes including all the new modern versions. These strippers patiently posed for me as I learned to photograph them. Just like live drawing teaches painters how the body looks in different poses, taking photographs of a naked woman or man taught me to photograph them with clothes on.

Quite a few of the exotics that I knew were fabulous dancers, self-stylists, actors who had the self-confidence of Laura Faye.

Now this old man can look back at this image (lofty term?) of Laura Faye with the knowledge that I was plain lucky. I took the picture (notice the photographs on either side of that Kodak Tri-X  roll) without knowing but there was something in me that pushed me to click that shutter.

I am sure that if I met up with Faye now I would be able to repeat that photograph, but this time knowing what I was doing.

Michael J. Fox - Leo & Me 1978

Brent Carver 7 Leo & Me group photograph - 1978

As I look back on my life, something that in those early days of January, is one of my customs, I think that somehow I have always been there to record the passing of mankind through my personal life.

My Rosemary, our two daughters Alexandra and Hilary left Mexico City with the idea of a brighter future in Canada. For a while it seemed it was not going to happen. The only job I was able to find (even though I thought I was God’s gift to man as a photographer) was to wash cars on Tilden-Rent-a-Car on Alberni Street. I was soon promoted to counter clerk.

I don’t know exactly how this happened but sometime around 1977 the French CBC in Vancouver inaugurated their TV station. In those days while there was no wall between the French and English side of the CBC building on Hamilton Street there was a demarcation line of sorts. The folks on the French side needed what was the called the station ID slide. They were offered some by the English side. The offer was rejected.

When we had arrived to Vancouver we had quickly decided to live in Burnaby so that our daughters could go to French Immersion schools in Maillardville in nearby Coquitlam. And Burnaby was not that far from Vancouver. It was in one of those schools where I met a now legendary French Canadian called Jacques Bayou who told me to go to the French CBC and offer my services.

I was quickly dispatched to take photographic slides of Vancouver. By some strange and lucky-for-me coincidence the English side hired me to take still photographs of their then very popular variety shows and programs that were called drama like Leo & Me that featured Brent Carver and Michael J. Fox.

It was because of the CBC that I eventually became a magazine photographer in Vancouver and my career took off.

I remember one day around 1977 when I went home and told Rosemary, “Today at the CBC I found out that the province is pronounced New-fun-land. I feel a bit Canadian today.”

A few years later I became a Canadian Citizen and I have pride in being one. And most important I am proud of my CBC and what it does to unify our sprawling country.

The CBC must survive all the cost cutting and be what it was once a beacon for good TV programs and CBC Radio stations with more culture to enlighten us on how lucky we are to live in this country.

David Breashears - June 1999

Because I studied for four years in a Roman Catholic high school in Austin, Texas I have an extensive vocabulary of American expressions that I use often.

One that is in my mind these days is “tying up loose ends”. Because of my advanced age I call people I have not spoken with or seen for some years to apologize if I ever offended or simply (that American expression) to touch base.

As a magazine photographer in the last century, and part of this one, I was in an environment that rewarded excellence not only with good money but with repeated work. There was lots of competition but thanks to pushy art directors in Vancouver Magazine (Rick Staehling and Chris Dahl) and a push but inspirational editor Malcolm Parry I went out of my way to take photographs that were interesting because they were elaborate. I was soon working for many magazines across Canada and eventually for the Globe & Mail in which I worked with fabulous writers like Christopher Dafoe and John Lekich.

I know that when I die (statistically soon as I am 81) I will do so with lots of intelligent information that might help anybody trying to take good photographs.  The only action left for me is to “beat on my own drum”.

In the beginning of June 1999 I got a call from the Globe to photograph an IMAX cinematographer who was going to be in town. Not only had he climbed to the top of Mount Everest several times, he had finally done so with a large IMAX camera to make a documentary.

How did I prepare? I studied the availability of mountain climbing equipment at Mountain Co-op. I went to the Science World and borrowed a strip of IMAX film. I decided to photograph David Breashears in a semi profile with no eye contact, reminiscent of National Geographic photographs of heroic dreamers. I shot the photograph in black and white and made an 11x14 inch print. I went to Mountain C0-Op with a flash and softbox, a tripod and my Mamiya RB-67 loaded with Ektachrome. I borrowed the mountain climbing equipment and photographed it shooting down.

What was my reward besides the good Globe money? They ran the photograph really big on the front page of their Arts & Leisure section.

Now photographers have few publications that will hire them and if they get an assignment they will not try hard.

That is a pity.

The days after New Year’s are days where nothing much happens. When I was a busy magazine photographer, I never felt guilty in not doing anything in them. Now that I am not obliged to do anything except sleep, wake up, feed Niño and Niña, rest, do nothing and then sleep again, I go through pangs of anxiety that are awfully existential.

I know that I have to keep going as I do not know anybody who would take care of my cats. And so I write.

At my age of 81 I must confess that this Latin macho is no longer in the least interested in women. I smile when I see a woman wearing a dress on the street. I hate what Lululemon has done to the female rear end. I am tired of cleavage and I am not interested in either dromedary or bactrian camels. I am only interested in one woman and she is my Rosemary. She is dead.

My extensive negative and slide files, not to mention my digital files have at least 700 women wearing very little if nothing at all. Of them and of my other files I think back to sometime around 1990 when Rosemary and I were driving away from out Kerrisdale home to visit our Lillooet daughter. I told Rosemary, “We could hire and arsonist while we are gone. We would return to our house that would all be burned to the ground.” She smiled and said it wasn’t such a bad idea to have no posessions.

As I get older the idea of legacy becomes less important.

But thanks to inspiration by Joan Didion to write so I can find out what I am thinking and Garry Winogrand who photographed things to find out what they looked like photographed, I write and I take photographs.

I must tip my hat to my friend C who has nagged me to photograph her since 2019 (I have photographed her 11 times). At one point, if you realize I am not interested in women, be they dressed or undressed, you must understand that I was becoming bored.

But I never got to that point as C’s nagging (a tad gentle) made me think of new techniques and to take chances and do new things. I am now inspired by Didion,Winogrand and C.

While my peers show me sunsets on their phones I am happily printing C’s pictures for her and for me to enjoy and realize that at 81 I am still pretty good at what I do.

Thank you C.

The photo you see here I took on 2023 Halloween. I used my digital Fuji X-E3 and I used a shutter of ½ second while I slowly moved my camera from up to down. I focused on a mirror on the other side of my little studio so that I could include myself.

And today I had a visitor. It was my friend Marv Newland. He sat down on my studio bench and 5 minutes later he walked out of my office with an 8 1/2  by 11 inch print.

We went to town and had lunch with MacLeod's Don Stewart and talked about books. Returning I left Newland at Miri's barbershop on Broadway (around the corner from my house). Newland, Christopher Gaze and I coincidentally get our haircut by the same Albanian.