Richard Tetrault - Flight Path # 1

Richard Tetrault - Luminous Shoreline # 1

I went into my first darkroom in 1962 and except for the years I was in the Argentine Navy as a conscript I was often in one until 6 years ago when Rosemary and I moved from our Kerrisdale home (which had a darkroom) to our little Kitsilano home that has no darkroom.

I sort of miss those long and happy evenings where I worked until the middle of the night on processing film and using the enlarger to print b+w photographs and colour prints,too. My basement darkroom was roomy but not too well ventilated. In some respects I should be dead now as I used Kodak Selenium Toner  ( a known carcinogen) to make my photographs archival. I sometimes played music.

Now I have a garage that is half a little photo studio and a wall separates it from my oficina.

I have an EpsonP700 printer that is frugal with ink and thanks to advice from Grant Simmons and Jeff Gin I am a very good printer. In some ways I do not miss that darkroom (dark it was). Her I am often accompanied by my cats Niño and Niña. I have my large mug of tea and with my Epson V700 scanner I can combine the technology of the 20^th century with the 21^st.

I have a friend, prolific artist Richard Tetrault. I asked him to bring his latest work to our monthly meetings (photographers, artists, writers, degigners, etc) at the Sylvia Hotel. He told me that they were too big to bring in his bicycle. I asked him to send me digital files. I printed them in less than 5 minutes. They are lovely. Perhaps he can sell them as a limited series of inkjets.

To me the nomenclature inkjet needs to be revitalized to be up there with the excellence of a darkroom printed photograph. Below is my inkjet print of my granddaughter Rebecca that I took in 2010. Because it is an inkjet I was able to tint it red to myspecifications.

Because I have taken so many photographs since I started in 1958 I am constantly finding negatives, slides and in the case here, Polaroids that fell into files or boxes and I never did notice them.

This one of Rosemary and Rebecca is not a flattering portrait of my Rosemary. I still want to place here and comment on the fact that the photograph (you can see my softbox on the top left corner) represents a time that will never return. It cannot be repeated. That saddens me. I cannot throw the Polaroid away. Would I be throwing some aspect of their souls?

View from the Majestic Hotel Restaurant, 13 October 2023

Philosopher Ramón Xirau taught me for two years from 1962 to 1963 at Mexico City College. He covered from the pre-Socratics to Sartre. I learned lots of stuff. One night a few weeks ago I could not sleep. I started to think.

I came up with this startling conclusion (at least to me) that those Greek philosophers had no books or phones. What did they do besides teach? 

They thought.

These cold rainy days in which with my two cats on top of me for most of the day I seem to do nothing except think and try (with no success) not to think on how I miss my Rosemary now gone since December 9, 2020.

Back in October, 2013 at the Zócalo Feria del Libro in Mexico City (these initials are now popular CDMX) I took my friend Laura Zamora (a friend of my oldest daughter Ale) for dinner at the Hotel Majestic that overlooks (nice view) the Zócalo which is the centre of Mexico City and where the book fair was being held.

Laura Zamora in the Majestic Hotel Lobby

It was impossible for me not to think that I frequented the outdoor veranda (now gone) with Rosemary in the early 1970s and had lovely breakfasts with a warm sun. The veranda is now covered and the restaurant is well kept and the food is very good.

The hotel is central to a book by my friend Paco Taibo II called La Sombra de la Sombra. I have 18 of his books, mostly in Spanish but it seems I read this one in English. I remember nothing of the book. In fact I have at least 4000 books, of which I have read most, yet I remember little of their contents.

Paco Taibo II at the Rosario Castellanos Bookstore

Thinking about this I have come to the conclusion that all the information of those books, all the people in my life, who are mostly dead, contributed to the person that I am now. I may not remember about The Shadow of the Shadow, but its contents are like a fertilizer you pour on a plant and the plant grows and flowers.

Because poetry is usually much shorter I can quote lots of it. I especially remember Jorge Luís Borges’s poem  La Lluvia (Rain) with that line that is impossible to translated into English:

“el curioso color del colorado”

In my thoughts I wonder if one could enter my brain and separate the fragments that represent books, visual experiences and conversations and dealings with family and other human beings.

I have concluded that I am a person that is made up of a considerable amount of experienced fragments.

In the 80s I did not hold a job. I was a freelance photographer.  I liked to hang out at Malcolm Parry’s Vancouver Magazine. I was there so often that many thought I worked there. Mac, as we all called Parry, had an office at the end of a long hall. His door was always open. I watched politicians, hoods, actors, actresses, boxers, business people, radio announcers, wrestlers, illustrators, photographers, writers, prostitutes, singers, punkers and even a young man wearing a Santa Claus T-shirt enter Parry's open door.

Many of them left the magazine with some sort of assignment. I got to photograph many of them.

Today I found out that Stan Persky died yesterday. I looked in my writers' files and he was not there. On a chance I looked in my regular files under P. There he was.

At my age of 82 I have very little memory of the man except that I shot photographs for some of the articles he wrote for Mac. When I photographed him I remember one salient fact. I asked him, “How would you define yourself sir?” His answer, “I am a dreamer.”

In the 20 frames of my Tri-X roll, that I surely shot in some spot in the magazine, I regret that the date of the newspaper he is holding is not sharp enough for me to discern.

Having these photographs serve to remind me that so many of the people I have known in my life are either dead or not long for this world. 

A friend who calls me every day (a rare occurrence in my life) insists (rightly I believe) that he and I are lucky to have lived in that second half of the 20^th century. Leibniz said, and Voltaire parodied, his thought on Candide that indeed I may have lived in the best of all possible worlds.

Mac’s door was open. I could dream of a story and a photograph and sometimes a month later that dream could even be on the cover.

While not an intellectual as Persky, I can indeed proclaim, that I, too, was a dreamer.

Sobering for me is the fact that he was only one year older than I am.

Rosa 'Sweet Juliet' & Hosta 'Lucky Mouse' 14 October 2024

 

Borges, ¿qué es para usted la poesía? ¿Cómo la definiría?

Borges: Creo que la poesía es algo tan íntimo, algo tan esencial que no puede ser definido sin diluirse. Sería como tratar de definir el color amarillo, el amor, la caída de las hojas en el otoño… Yo no sé cómo podemos definir las cosas esenciales.

 (En Roberto Alifano: Conversaciones con Borges. Buenos Aires, Editorial Atlántida, 1984).

What is poetry for you? How would you define it?

Borges: I believe that poetry is something so intimate, something essential that cannot be defined without diminishing its meaning. It would be like trying to define the colour yellow, love, the fall of leaves in autumn…Y don’t know how we can define essential things.

Today, 14 October 2024 I will be visited by my youngest daughter Hilary. I will prepare dinner and we will then watch the Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC. Both Rosemary and I adored her.

I noticed the lovely fall colour of Hosta ‘Lucky Mouse’ and the fact that somehow English Rose, Rosa ‘Sweet Juliet’ was in bloom. It had several buds but the chances of them opening with the coming rains made me decide to cut them and scan them.

No matter the season it is always one that reminds me of my Rosemary. This scan has her lovely face on it.