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| Viktoria Langton |
These days I seem to begin my blogs by stating my advanced age of 82. The fact is that because I am a product of that last century, a century where we had journalism and photographers with style, and, not to forget, people with manners, who when angry, would decide to write a letter to the editor but never did.
I am not interested in film award ceremonies and I am totally uninterested in red-carpet-cleavage. I am tired of seeing the women in my Kits neighbourhood walking with tight black yoga pants.
I can finalize the point above by stating that the only woman I am interested in is my dead wife (we were married for 52 years). She died 9 December 2020.
What excites and pleases me? That is an easy question to answer. It is my memory of all the beautiful women I have photographed, from my two Argentine girlfriends, my wife and to all the women who faced my camera in Vancouver since 1975 when we arrived here from Mexico.
While It is not an important reason why I married my Rosemary, I can say she had legs that rivalled my mother’s. And mine, too as I inherited from my mother.
What other woman had legs like that (a bit muscular as she was and is a dancer)?
In the late 70s my first real job in the city was to photograph variety shows at Studio 40 and 41 at our CBC on Hamilton Street. A man called James Hibbard led a group of female dancers. One of them, Viktoria Langton had legs that were outstanding. And what more? Her face was angular with wide cheekbones. And she had that hard-to-define quality that is presence.
We have been friends since then. I first took her pictures in my Burnaby basement studio sometime in the beginning of the 80s. I experimented with different types of b+w film (never colour and I wonder why not?). One of those photographs was on our Mexican hanging chair. I still have it. It was there where using a new high contrast film called Kodak Technical Pan that it was that I took my best photographs of her.
I have to confess that I was shy. Langton at one point in the chair offered to reveal her small breasts (my faves!). I gently demurred and said, “No.” What an idiot I was.
Now sometime after mid March I will have coffee with Langton. Will she offer to pose for me on the hanging chair?
