Have lived in Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Veracruz, Nueva Rosita, Austin and in Vancouver. The only place I have been able (and allowed) to vote is in Canada’s Vancouver.

This is why I take my voting seriously. Today I lined up for almost 3 hours to vote for our municipal elections.

It was virtually impossible and most difficult for me to vote for Argentine elections when I was in Mexico. In some cases this was because of the military governments in power banned voting.

When I finally returned to Buenos Aires in 1965 to fulfill my obligation of conscription in the Argentine Navy I found out that I could not vote while being in the armed services. What is strange is that for normal people in Argentina, voting is compulsory and you are fined if you do not vote.

Our freely elected country doctor, Arturo Illía, was inside the government building La Casa Rosada on June 28, 1966. I was with other soldiers, sailors, airmen and officers. We had surrounded the building. In my hand I had a 1906 Mauser. An officer with a loudspeaker, most respectfully said, “Mr. President you have 60 minutes to leave the premises." This he did in a taxi.

The next day the military junta’s first decree explaining that they were concerned about Argentine youth being cheated at night clubs when they paid their bills because of bad lighting, now stipulated the minimum wattage for these clubs so the youth could see their bills. The second and third decrees eliminated the constitution and all political parties.

For me, to vote in Vancouver for federal or municipal elections, is a right that I enjoy. When I tell my Argentine family and friends that I vote at schools or community centres and that there are no soldiers with machine guns guarding the entrances, they do not believe me.

I do not take this right for granted. I thank the perspicacity of my wife Rosemary who in 1975 told me that she, our two daughters and I were going to move to Canada. She knew all the above before I ever had any idea.

In an example that coincidence is more often than not, in 1972, I was teaching Spanish in a Jesuit university, Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico City.  A man came to lecture about the huge budgets of American companies and compared them to the small ones of Latin American countries. When he finished I went up to him and said, “Doctor, yo vi como usted she fue a su casa en taxi.” He smiled and gave me a big hug.

Arthur Erickson

My eldest granddaughter Rebecca is in hospital because of a bad infection and sometime tonight she will be operated on in New Westminster. I went to visit and we chatted for 3 hours. I gave her a book (a copy I purchased at MacLeod books yesterday).

 MacLeod Books

Which book? This one, link below, because it influenced me more than any other book I have ever read. I bought my copy in 1966 in the Buenos Aires bookstore Pigmalion that sold books in every language except in Spanish. When I was buying Markings there was a man also there who was buying books. He was an oldish man who was almost blind. I was much too stupid and ignorant to realize that I was standing right next to Jorge Luís Borges.

Markings

Because the book has short paragraphs, and is not a novel, Rebecca will be able to pick it up every once in a while on her hospital bed.

In our conversation I had to bring up the subject of a famous Canadian architect that she met at least three times. My favourite time (and she did remember!) is when I was having a picnic outside the Museum of Anthropology with an old man with grey hair. Rebecca came up to him and said, “Who are you? You look familiar.” The man answered, “I am Arthur Erickson and I built this place.”

After seeing her smile I told her another story. This is based on the fact that portrait photographers, to make their subjects ready for their portrait, must find some sort of common ground.

I was in Erickson’s little garage-turned-into a little house and asked him. “Arthur, why do you live here when you could have bought a house with a view of the mountains and the sea?” His answer is one that I would guess he never ever told any writers who may have interviewed him.

“I wanted to live in a place that did not have a view made by God. I wanted a view that I put in as I planted this garden.”

When I was about to shoot the portrait here, Erickson told me, “Alex you want to make me look like Frank Lloyd Wright.” I immediately answered, “Not a chance as you are wearing flip-flops."

Hannah Parkhouse & Iryngium giganteum 'Miss Willmott's Ghost'

Miss Willmott's Ghost & Rosemary 

Repeated Failure On Purpose 

Plants in a darkroom enlarger

My grandmother drummed into me an expression, “Cuando el diablo no tiene nada que hacer con el rabo espanta moscas.” This translates to, “When the devil is bored he swats flies with his tail.”

My experience is that swatting flies in a darkroom or in my oficina facing my  scanner and extensive cabinets with negatives, slides and prints, leads to surprisingly wonderful experiments that result in new techniques.

I was bored one summer day in our Kerrisdale home when I wondered what would happen if I put a plant in my enlarger instead of a negative. For at least a month I used whatever plant in my garden that would fit my 6x7cm enlarger. They were a mixture of negative and positive. I have two boxes full of them.

He above may have led me to wonder what would happen if I suspended a rose from my garden over my scanner. That was in 2001 and since then I have amassed over 3000 of what I call scanographs.

In the comfort of my bright, fume free oficina, I have made negative sandwiches (without mayonnaise) that are very nice.

In photography errors can lead to surprising results. An important factor is to figure out how the error was made so as to repeat it.

With my digital camera I was taking photographs of a beautiful cellist, Marina Hasselberg. I tremendously underexposed a few of the shots with my digital Fuji X-E3. When I downloaded the files I found a few completely black rectangles. I was about to trash them when I wondered. The results, with my 20-year-old Photoshop 8 were in my books, spectacular.

Recently I photographed Hannah Parkhouse and I used that technique. I feel that I am a good devil and good, too at swatting flies.                                     

1959

I was 6 in a Buenos Aires kindergarten. In my class there were the then famous Diligenti quintuplets. Two were boys and three were girls. I distinctly remember being attracted to one of the girls and I often lifted her skirts.

I wonder what would happen in this century if a boy that age repeated my action. Would he be pilloried? He would probably be taken to a psychiatrist and or ejected from school.

When I was 8 and American girl, daughter of one of my mother’s friends came for a visit and asked me, “Do you want to see it?” I answered, “Yes,” and I did.

I was 9 when in the American school I was attending we read Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. It was then that I first experienced the concept of falling in love. I fell for Estella hard.

Because I was a nerd before the concept was invented, my relations with girls were subdued until I attended St. Edward’s High School in Austin Texas in 1958. It was in 1959, I was 17, that I became attracted to a short girl, called Judy Reyes who attended a Catholic school on the other side of Austin called St. Mary’s. She was a cheerleader. From my vantage point, playing the alto saxophone in the school band, we were right next to the cheerleaders during football games. I would wait for that most pleasant moment when Reyes would jump and I would see her white underwear. I felt no sense of guilt in wanting to do this.

I managed to dance a couple of times with her (I was a terrible dancer) and I remember that one of the songs was the theme song from the film A Summer Place. I even managed to go to a movie with her and even met her parents. After that she faded from my life as she had more aggressive boyfriends, one of them being my classmate Joe Davis.

About 6 years ago I located her. She was now living in San Antonio and she had a business selling cheer-leading equipment. The emails went back and forth until I mentioned the underwear. She told me she was born again and I never heard from her again.

A year after I married my Rosemary in 1968 I photographed her nude from the waist up. I was much too shy! Unlike Canadian men I posed her standing and not in a tub while pregnant. "Dear, let me take a picture of junior before he is born."

In this 21^st century, 4 years after my Rosemary died I am only interested in one woman. She is Rosemary. When I walk in my Kitsilano neighbourhood and I see a woman walking wearing a dress I often thank them for wearing one. They usually smile. I have a complete distaste for tight black yoga pants.

In my files I may have at least 60 women I photographed (many called me out of the blue and asked me for “different photographs”) wearing little or nothing. I soon found out and I now define pornography as something done in bad taste. I think my taste was impeccable.

In those TV red carpet events, I find the dresses worn by starlets, actresses and influencers as being in such bad taste that to me they are a new version of pornography that is worse than anything that I can readily find on my phone as videos.

With women now being on par with men (it was about time) why is it that men still dress conservatively?

I can only state here that what I saw as good taste and manners in the 20^th century is now gone.

Popular in Facebook is that revolving circular stage, with young women, that is an attraction in Germany. The stage, as it revolves shows you glimpses of underwear. I wonder where are this site’s awful “community standards”.

It was perhaps 10 years ago that I took a photograph in my studio in memory of Judy Reyes. I know that a print of it I cannot show it to anybody. Am I a fiend?

May 21, 1979

May 28, 2007

Thanks to my Rosemary I have no financial obligations or worries. I do feel isolated. Friends, family and people I worked with, either younger than my 82 years, or older are dying. Those that are alive have all kinds of terrible diseases. I am healthy even though my daily statins and baby aspirins cement the idea that one day soon that important valve in my chest will cease pumping blood.

Until then I have come to realize, in the last few weeks, that I live to write my daily blog, take photographs with my film and digital cameras, and garden now that spring has arrived. 

I have one obligation, a pleasant one, which is to wake up early in the morning and feed my cats Niño and Niña. Important, too, is, weather permitting, I walk with Niño around the block. I miss the presence of  Rosemary but my cats do their best to shower me with warmth and affection.

The above gives me a lot of time to think. I do read, but thinking is paramount now. I feel like a second-class pre-Socratic philosopher. This thought process takes me to my many memories and I associate them with one another.

A friend came for a visit some weeks ago & I showed him my Sting files. He said, “Your daughters must know you are cool as you have an autographed photograph that you took of Sting.” I am not sure of that.

My association with Sting takes me to the Denman Inn (no longer exists as either a hotel or a movie theatre) where Sting posed for me without his band members. As we left writer Les Wiseman said to me, “Imagine this, he said his band will be the next Beatles. He is fu….. crazy!”

From the memory of that picture, a few years later, I would go to the Number 5 Orange Street bar to see strippers. My favourite was Little Mary Arnold. Why? She danced to Message in a Bottle.

In the second scan here is a strange 45RPM record given to me by Sting that contains two versions of that song.

When I finally met Police guitarist Andy Summers we connected. He was and is a very good photographer. He was interested in my use of a Kodak film called Technical Pan which was the sharpest film ever made. I gave him a roll. 

The group shot of the Police I took at the Coliseum when I was obsessed in using a beautifully corrected 20mm wide angle lens. Should have I gotten closer?

Besides Message in a Bottle my other absolutely favourite Sting song is An Englishman in New York.

An Englishman in New York

While my father was born in Buenos Aires, his parents were from Manchester. To me he was a paragon of Englishness. He drank. I would accompany him on the bed and we would sing together My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean. In my neighbourhood I had two friends. One Miguelito was El Tano (Italian) Mario was El Alemán and I was El Inglesito (the English boy).

My mother taught me to smell behind the ears (this I did often with Rosemary when we were in bed). My mother told me I smelled like an Englishman.

During the Malvinas/Falklands war, because I am an Anglo Argentine I was undecided on my loyalty. In the end, because I had been a conscript in the Argentine Navy I rooted for the obvious underdogs.

While in the navy we were told that the lines in our sailor collar represented Nelson’s victories. When I donated blood to the British Hospital, knowing that Argentine Navy regulations said I could take the next day off I indulged in the hospital’s Thé Completo. This was tea with sandwiches and scones.

Our two daughters, Alexandra and Hilary were born in Tacubaya a Mexico City neighbourhood. Why? Because Rosemary gave birth to them at the British Hospital.

It took 52 years of marriage with Rosemary before she told me she did not like my famous (with other folks) English-style cucumber sandwiches.

It would seem that when meet my oblivion, seconds before, if I am compos menti, I will have to decide if my death will be an Argentine or and English one.