With Niño & Niña - How is it possible I don't remember taking this photograph?

Blog 6025
 

There is a strong possibility that this blog will be a surprisingly positive and pleasant blog about my Rosemary and it will bypass any melancholic moments I might have had today that were exacerbated by today’s grim weather.

I am firmly a person who is a product of the last century. I rarely find anything in this one that can compare in positive quality. But I did today.

I will begin by citing the origin of the word intimidad (intimacy in Spanish) which is from the Latin intimus which means something that is at the bottom of something, situated in its most inside. Dictionary of the Real Academia Española.

Rosemary and I were married for 52 years, and before that, we knew each other for two months. In those 52 years we constantly surprised each other by stuff that we did not know about each other. It took Rosemary 51 years to tell me she did not like my “famous” cucumber sandwiches. It wasn’t until we spent a whole day at the Metropolitan Museum in NY that I finally knew that she had a tremendous interest in art. Because Rosemary was internal in her thoughts, it took me by surprise.

Now let’s go to that 21^st century wonder that I discovered today. In my Messenger lists I found 1. Rosemary, 2. Rosemary and Ale, 3. Rosemary and Ale, 4. Rosemary and Rebecca,5. Rosemary and Hilary.

Her conversations are much too intimate for me to place here but the photographs! Many times when we travelled she would hand me her phone and ask me to take her picture. Or there are pictures taken by Alexandra of Rosemary when she visited her in Lillooet. There a few selfies and many pictures that Rosemary downloaded from my blog.

In short many of the photographs I have never seen but important, too is her choice of my photographs from my blogs that she sent to our daughters and granddaughters. They represent a facet of Rosemary I had no idea about. The act of choosing a photograph is in itself an intimate choice.

Thinking about all this today with my two cats on top of me on the bed I had the idea that in some way looking at these photographs is similar to riffling the drawers of a wife’s underwear.

Rosemary kept notes and a diary when she was in Mexico. Important is the loss to me that she never did write about how we met. I will never be able to ask her, “How did I pick you up that day I saw you leave that school we both worked for? I saw you from the back and I was dazzled by your lovely legs and your miniskirt. What did I say to you?”

I will never know.

At La Bodega

Stool given to Rosemary by Ale

Niño

Buenos Aires

I have many scarves but this soft cashmere one that Rosemary gave me when we moved to Kits if my fave.

Niño

Her most favourite Camellia 'Donation

Í had never seen this photo which I must have taken with her iPhone

One of our last trips to visit Hilary (and Lauren) in Burnaby before Rosemary died

Hilary and Rebecca when they had just moved to Burnaby

Most of these photographs were taken by Rebecca on July 3 2020

Alexandra snapped Rosemary in Lillooet

Hilary as a little girl

Hilary at the Stanley Park fire engine

Two photographs taken by Alexandra at a Squamish restaurant

Florence

Venice

Italy

Venice

The Cineplex has no benches to sit on. Rosemary took the photograph

The Congreso - Buenos Aires

The Buenos Aires Subte

A selfie in the Buenos Aires Subte (subway). Rosemary notice the Jorgito behind me. Jorge is my first name

Helleborus 'Wedding Crasher' - 22 February 2024

The Corsican Hellebore & St. Helena 

Today was a fairly sunny day so Niño and I went for a walk around the block. Even with the weather being pleasant both my cats do not want to stay outside and they opt for getting on top of me when I am on the bed drinking a mug of tea and knowing I have to do nothing. And philosophically that is unsettling.

I had noticed that Helleborus ‘Wedding Crasher’ was in bloom. Rosemary adored her hellebores because they bloomed early in our garden. What this also means is that I can no longer postpone the cleaning up of the garden. This was fun activity when Rosemary and I shared it. Now I avoid it but I must begin to at least partially prune some of my roses before I do that in March. I will be slightly cheered up as when I prune them the Nick Lowe song Cruel to be Kind meanders in the soundscape of my brain.

I wonder if any of my over 3000 plant scans (I started in 2001) will ever make it as part of my legacy that anybody might appreciate.

Originally my scans had the purpose of documenting with accuracy a plant on a given day scanned at 100% size and being watchful that the colour was accurate. When people visit me and they point how they like one of these images (big on the wall) they rapidly lose interest when I tell them that it is not a photograph but a scanograph and that I am a scanographer.

What keeps me sane and mostly cheerful is that I keep in my head what Garry Winogrand once said, “I photograph things to see what those things look like photographed.”

My scans of my plants brings me close to them with an intimacy that makes me feel that Rosemary is near. She was the person who noticed the details of plants as she comfortably sat on the garden lawn or our Kits deck without and visible discomfort. She was most flexible.

And so this scan of the hellebore I dedicate to my Rosemary and I promise her that I will start the cleanup perhaps even tomorrow if the nice weather persists. 

The Corsican Hellebore was Rosemary's fave. I no longer have one. I will try to find one this Saturday at Phoenix Perennials in Richmond.

Corsican Hellebore - 2007

 

On Monday Hilary and I went to the Fifth Avenue Cinema to see The Taste of Things directed by Tran Anh Hung and with Juliette Binoche and with her former paramour Benoit Magimel. The icing on this delicious cake of a film is young actress Bonnie Chagneau-Ravoire. In the film she is given a spoon to taste and she is able to identify all the ingredients and spices with an incredibly lovely but serious face.

The first 30 minutes puts you into a kitchen where you rarely see faces but hands and lots of cooking. I suspect that vegans could not possibly watch this film as there is a lot of disembowelling of animals.

Because I worked for many years as stills man at the CBC I know excellent camera work when I see it. This film is stellar. In the closing scenes the camera rotates 360 degrees 3 times without wavering up or down and surprising images show up that I will not reveal here.

My daughter Hilary inherited from my Rosemary,and perhaps even from me, her father, a good quantity of snobbishness. I enjoy  almost weekly our companionship where we see good films in real film theatres.

After our film we like to go to a pizza joint on the corner of Howe and Davie where the staff is Filipino and Latin American. This combination of a fine film and pizza has become a comfortable tradition. I drive Hilary to her home in Burnaby and I drive back knowing my Niño and Niña will be waiting for me.

Firecrust Neapolitan Pizzeria - 808 Davie corner with Howe.

Jean Stilwell  - March 2004

Jean Stilwell - Mezzo- Soprano

Authenticity Be Damned
 

Mezzo-soprano Jean Stilwell has been in my thoughts for days.

It all began when I remember my session with her in my Granville and Robson studio. Because I could not remember her name I could not find he in my alphabetical order files. This happens with age and I am 81. Googling did not help.

But there was this that happened and I did remember. At the time Stilwell came to my studio she was 49. After I took her photographs she asked me to photograph her bare chest. I was shocked and asked her why. She told me that she had a good friend in Vancouver, an actress called Babz Chula who had breast cancer. She wanted to have the picture taken in solidarity. So I took the picture but began with a Polaroid.

Then I made a rude mistake (now with age I would know better). I told her that I had problems shooting her chest as her breasts were droopy. She did not quite get angry but put me in my place in that her breasts were what all breast do at her age.

I then told her (sort of making up for my rudeness) that I would take the Polaroid and find a nice Seagull pewter frame (then made in Pugwash, Nova Scotia). There was a Seagull store on Robson. That evening Stilwell smiled when I presented her with the framed Polaroid.

I put Babz Chula into my internal Blogger search engine and found the two blogs I wrote about Stilwell and how that date of March 20-27 2004 in the Vancouver Sun marked my first manipulated photograph!