Jackie Coleman - The Smell of Wet Earth
My Rosemary often told me that I lived too much in my past. A new Argentine friend of mine, Daniel Pauni, who is a retired literature professor in Buenos Aires, has told me that the Indigenous of Bolivia and Peru place the past in front and the future in back. The word for in front is ñawpaq and the qhipa is behind.
In a recent CBC Radio Ideas about the philosophy of St. Augustine I learned that the philosopher/saint stated that in music, you hear a note in the past, then one in the present and you can predict that future note. This means you can accurately predict the future. Obviously the Bishop of Hippo did not know the existence of atonal music.
All the above means that I know who is Captain Beefheart and I have had too much to think.
Captain Beefheart - Too Much to Think
A few days ago I found an envelope that read CBC – Jackie Coleman – Leon Bib – nice colour negs.
I took these photographs in Studio 40 at the Vancouver CBC in 1977. I did stills for their variety shows. This one involved fabulous sets by a man called Victor Miles. We became friends and I would often visit him in Lions Bay.
The two dancers in my negatives are Jeff Hyslop and Jackie Coleman. Even though I was a rank amateur I knew I was watching excellence on that stage which was lit a deep red.
To make ends meet, Coleman was an ecdysiast at the Number 5 Orange on Main and Cordova. Because of her dancing talent, and the fact that the DJ there was James Hibbard, who was the head of the CBC dancers she sometimes dances with ballet shoes. She was perhaps one of the best exotics I ever saw.
The last time I saw her she was working on construction sites with a sign to tell us to slow down. She died April 2, 2024.
I am a thinking man telling myself that soon I will be 83 and statistically I will not be around much longer. I am throwing stuff, ordering my photographs into portfolio files. Technically I am PTD (preparing to die). And paradoxically I am bringing back to life a woman I photographed so long ago. Only a photographer can understand the idea of a moment in time, perhaps 1/60 of a second, and that my subject was alive in these very negatives that I have scanned.
For these three I have used my now exciting technique (to me) of scanning two negatives, one on top of the other with my Epson flatbed scanner.
I wonder what St. Augustine would have said of the above.
