Lauren Elizabeth Stewart - 2009

I have lived most of my life in that past 20th century. Now that I am 82, I feel I can take advantage not only of what that past century gave, but I can also take advantage of the offerings of this one.

As an example I place my daily blog links into Facebook and Twitter. Facebook provides me with one special service. Every day they send me 9 or more past blogs with that day’s date. Today I will be shown a few from October 8s from the past.

Because I have now written 6239 blogs (including this one) it is impossible for me to remember them all. A few days ago I was shown this blog:

My scary girls weren’t scared

In it I was suddenly amazed by a portrait of Lauren posing by a fern in our Athlone Street home in Kerrisdale in 2009.

It was simple for me to find the negative. I looked in my family files for the year of 2009 and found an envelope marked as Rebecca and Lauren by fern.

I believe that in this century the concept of a contact sheet of b+w or colour negatives is gone. As a magazine photographer I learned to look at my contact sheet and find “the one”. Art directors also had that talent. In many cases these art directors and I would agree on the best shot.

Somehow when I took this photograph of Lauren, there are at least 15 but 4 in a strip that are all similar. I picked the last one.

Sometimes my best portrait was that last one. I have no idea why, except that with film I never wanted to waste film, so I would shoot the whole roll. I may have put special emphasis on that last shot.

As the portrait photographer that I am, these are the thoughts that came to me when I noticed this picture. Rosemary was alive and somewhere in the house. Perhaps she was in the garden or in the kitchen. Because I also took portraits of Rebecca in the same location was she still there watching me and even giving me some pointers? Unlike the photographs that I have taken in the past of people that are now dead I can look at this one and think, “She was alive then and very alive now at age 22.”

And my final thought is that when I discovered this portrait I would have immediately shown it to Rosemary. That is something that I cannot do. And I grieve.