Jorge Alejandro Waterhouse-Hayward - 1948

 

Cualquier destino, por largo y complicado que sea, consta en realidad de un solo momento: el momento en que el hombre sabe para siempre quién es. Jorge Luís Borges

Any destiny, no matter how long or complicated, consists in reality in one singular moment: the moment in which man knows for ever who he is. Jorge Luís Borges – my translation

Because I write in Spanish lots, my Twitter/X feed has literary content that interests me. There is lots of Borges. I have a big collection of Borges books (40 at least) but I cannot remember all of it. This quote I noticed today and it reminded me that I experienced, what Borges writes, when I was 6.

At the time in Buenos Aires, my mother taught physics and chemistry at the American School on Belgrano R, a neighbourhood not far from our Coghlan one. She had friends in the American Embassy and she would often show up at home with American products simply not available in Argentina. It was then that I experienced the delight of lime Jell-O.

There was something else that she brought that took me to the Borges moment. She showed me a little bag of something she called candy corn. She gave me a handful. They were delicious. I wanted more but she nodded negatively and put the bag in a living room armoire.

Later in the day, since I knew where she had hidden the treasure I opened the armoire and helped myself to lots more candy. There was a large mirror on one of the doors. I looked at myself in the reflection and thought, “This is me and nobody else”. I was 6. I believe that it was then that I became an individual.

When I look at myself in a mirror now, 76 years later, I see the same boy, older perhaps, and the time in between has flown.                  

EL SUICIDA – Jorge Luís Borges

No quedará en la noche una estrella.

No quedará la noche.

Moriré y conmigo la suma

del intolerable universo.

Borraré las pirámides, las medallas,

los continentes y las caras.

Borraré la acumulación del pasado.

Haré polvo la historia, polvo el polvo.

Estoy mirando el último poniente.

Oigo el último pájaro.

Lego la nada a nadie.

The Suicide – Jorge Luís Borges – my translation

No star will remain in the night

The night  will not remain

I will die and with me the sum

of the intolerable universe.

I will erase the pyramids, the medals,

the continents and the faces.

I will erase the accumulations of the past.

I am looking at the last sunset.

I listen to the last bird.

I cede nothing to nobody.

These past few weeks I have been unsettled and depressed knowing that a photographer and friend I taught in 2008, and a fine street photographer he was, is lined up for MAID in June.

His phone has been disconnected and my emails bounce back. I would want to have a final chat before his final choice.

The closest I have been to pain was at a dentist’s chair when they had slow drills. I cannot comprehend at one point when pain, or something else compels a person to choose oblivion.

Ripe in my mind is the question my Rosemary made in bed a few minutes before she died, “Am I dying?” I did not answer. I wonder if she feared her death or she was glad that her suffering would end.

I will never know and I will remember my friend until, I too, meet my eventual oblivion.

Photograph - Chris Dahl

For a while, particularly in that last century, photographers were often labelled as aggressive.

I don’t believe I ever fit that bill. My grandmother, who really educated me as my mother was too busy teaching to pay the bills in Argentina and then in Mexico, taught me to listen and to take advice.

If there is a decline in the quality of photography in this 21^st century, beyond the fact that journalism is pretty well dead, I see another reason for that decline. Photographers have no mentors and in my books a photographic mentor has to be a pushy art director and editor.

Few  have the idea to look for inspiration in books by other photographers. Both men I cite below would show me books and suggest I imitate in some way my photogaphs.

I met the best in that category. They are editor Malcolm (we called him Mac) Parry and art director (sometimes given the lofty title design director) Chris Dahl.

Both had other talents beyond the one at hand. Parry played a mean bent soprano saxophone, was a surveyor, a fabulous photographer and knew exactly what a four-wheel drift in a sports car was all about. Best of all he could discern writing talent in people who had no idea they had it in them.

Chris Dahl, was and is a fabulous drummer, composer, photographer, ceramic artist and painter. As an art director for Maclean’s he brought to Vancouver Magazine the concept of planning for two different covers stories, “just in case”.

As the photographer that he was and is he would advise me on techniques I had no idea existed. Sometimes he would force me do shoot in a particular way. I was afraid to rebel as he held the purse strings. Invariably his particular way was the correct one.

Sometimes he would use a short sentence that would inspire me. I was given the assignment to photograph some beautiful women (and one man). His direction was, “Use as little clothing as possible (them) and make the photographs heroic.”

There is one incident that happened in Mac’s office. He looked at some pictures I had taken. He furiously stared at me, threw one of my wide-angle lenses at me and said, “Alex, you are making the motions. Go back and take some good photographs.”

I believe that these two men taught me some well-directed humility as I understand to this day that they made me the photographer that I am today.

Thank you Chris and Mac.

Circa 1990

When one has too much to think (lyrics from Captain Beefheart’s Ashtray Hearts, and that’s me, I think about all sort of things.

Captain Beefheart & Ashtray Hearts

I have written many times how when I was 8 or 9 my mother took me to the Filipino Embassy in Buenos Aires which was in the same building as the American one. Also there was the Lincoln Library, an arm of the United States Information Service (many were spies). She left me in the library and I opened a magazine that was called American Heritage. In it I saw photographs taken by a man named Timothy O. Sullivan of dead Confederate soldiers. These were some of the first ever photographs I ever saw and particularly of dead people. I went into what I consider my first example of human association of contrasting the dead soldiers that looked very much like the live one walking outside on Calle Florida. I thought, “At one time these soldiers were alive.”

As so many people I have photographed in my life have died, I am constantly thinking that. Further thought tonight took me to thinking about grammatical gender in language. Examples:

Machines in Spanish are la máquina. So sometimes cars are seen as feminine and thus as women. A house is la casa, and sex (surprisingly) is el sexo.

March 29, 2025

That association brought me to the idea that many years ago I photographed a lovely woman with a clematis on her chest for a show in Calgary that was called Mother Earth. So in English to make earth feminine we attach mother to it. And we have Father Time. But death and life - la muerte - la vida.

There are two exceptions (as far as I know). We have Latinas and Filipinas but we must write a German woman.

Juan Manuel Sánchez in his Vancouver Studio circa 2010

Abstract art uses visual language of shape, form, color and line to create a composition which may exist with a degree of independence from visual references in the world.[1] Abstract art, non-figurative art, non-objective art, and non-representational art are all closely related terms. They have similar, but perhaps not identical, meanings. Wikipedia
 

5 April 2025

Since I began taking photographs for money in Vancouver around 1977 I always told people that I was a good technical photographer. Some suggested I was an artist. This I soundly denied. Why?

Vancouver is not really a place that promotes the arts particularly now in this first quarter of the 21^st century. Out CBC tells us about bridge traffic. There are Ideas and Reclaimed in an otherwise dry cultural desert.

Because of this many who are artists, and then fail, become bitter. Bitterness is a terrible emotion for anybody. I knew a couple of local photographers who became bitter and left town.

Telling people I was not an artist was a safe way of pursuing my own photographic interests. They were personal projects. I was once invited to contribute to a seminar for Emily Carr Institute art teachers who seemed to be in some sort of depression. On my first day I asked the class (mature art and photography professors (all men)) how many of them had personal projects. No hands went up.

I believe I am an artist and this is because I had a mentor, Argentine painter Juan Manuel Sánchez. He said I was one. he then proceeded to give me an education in the arts. We were friends for about 10 years until he returned to Buenos Aires. I visited him a couple of times and then he died. He has left an important impression in me. I do my personal projects just for me and I have no intention or hoping for anybody to care.

In this last week I suddenly figured out that Sánchez would have smiled had I shown him the photograph shown here.

I was not sure that when I placed this blog in Facebook if their “community standards” would not have seen it as abstract enough and would have removed it.