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| Alexandra Elizabeth - 14 on Mayne Island ferry |
Recently I have been on this inclination to write about portraits and what makes them so. I did this here.
When you have been doing something for a while, if you do not get good at it, that is the time when one should switch careers. At a Vancouver photography class I told my students that they should have a Plan B (plumbing) and a Plan C (electricity). Shortly after that I was fired.
In that other century photographers, particularly magazine and ad photographers, they were directed (pushed) by art directors and design directors. It is that missed direction that has photographers in this century to be rudderless and lost at sea.
My friend writer John Lekich and I often tell each other that we were born and lived in a good century and that this one is one that is not to our pleasure.
In that 20th I learned lots to point that I played a trick for fun but I never told the art directors in question what the game was. In those day days of shooting film, I would take to the magazine the b+w contact sheet or the slides. The art director would pick one of the b+ws or a slide. In the car, just for myself, I had the 8x10 print that was indicated by the art director with a red x-mark on my contact sheet. As for the slide I always knew which one they would pick.
It had little to do with knowing the art director’s likes, but more, that after many years in the business, one knew what was good and what wasn’t.
This brings me to this picture that faces me when I leave my bedroom and step into the stairs to feed my cats and make by breakfast. It is a portrait of my Alexandra when she was 14 (she is now 55) on board the Mayne Island ferry.
There is something about this photograph that pulls me in every time I walk down the stairs. Wind in ferries is good for hair. I have quite a few photographs of my wife, daughters and granddaughters on ferries. But what is this one all about? Had I shown the contact sheet to that art director this one would have been printed and in my car to be brought the next day. I never wanted those art directors to suspect. But perhaps they knew.
