Tarren

 

I have a friend who often told me when we went to the Commodore Ballroom to see a new British punk band would tell me, “Alex it has been done before.” Sometimes I would show him a photograph I was proud of and he would say the same. One day I caught on and when he said what he always said, I remember shouting, “But I haven’t done it yet!”

And so in our pursuit of art or a facsimile of it we have to copy until we can make the copy our very own.

Sometime at the end of the 20^th century we had a very good photography art gallery called The Exposure Gallery which was on Beatty Street. A young photographer proudly showed me his photographs on the wall and said, “Alex isn’t it interesting how nude bodyscapes resemble Sahara sand dunes?” I was about to utter, “It has been…” but I remembered and said nothing.

In the next few days I will be scanning about 10 medium format (6x7cm) b+w bodyscapes of the most wonderfully woman that ever posed for me for them and for many other photographs. Her name is Tarren and began taking her photographs around 1979.

To shoot proper bodyscapes you need a large studio. Over the wall you suspend a large or medium softbox (with a flash inside) using a boom. The light shoots vertically down. My subject, Tarren was on her side, etc on the floor. I had a dark brown canvas on the floor. You then expose to the highlights and let the rest of the body go dark. In the darkroom you attempted (with mixed results) to bring out some shadow detail. My Epson V700 scanner and my 22 year-old Photoshop 8 do wonders in showing some of that shadow detail.

Because of how standards for showing bodyscapes have changed to the worse and perhaps only viewable in a good art gallery, I am enclosing a couple of face shots that I think are lovely and one more that should pass the "community standards chaps". They are not cropped. I got very close with an extremely sharp 140mm Mamiya RB Lens that has floating elements to keep it sharp at any distance.  

Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad' 20 de septiembre de 2025

Metodología

En  el 2001 vivía con mi Rosemary (falleció el 9 de diciembre, 2020) en un enorme jardín de esquina en el barrio de Kerrisdale en Vancouver. Era un día caluroso de verano y estaba algo aburrido. Vi una linda rosa de Borbón Rosa ‘Reine Victoria’ y se me ocurrió cortar unas flores y escanearla con mi escáner Epson. Tuve suerte de principiante ya que me salió hermosa. Desde esa fecha he escaneado más de 4000 plantas, rosas y otras flores.  Me defino como un escanógrafo y mis imágenes no son fotos son escanografías.

Rosa 'Reine Victoria' -2001 

Tengo 83 años y no necesito dinero ya que mi Rosemary manejó nuestras finanzas muy bien. Escaneo por el simple placer y entenimiento.

Aquí en Vancouver, ya es casi otoño pero una que otra rosa está floreciendo. En especial, una de esas, es la excelente rosa inglesa Rosa ‘A Shropshire Lad’.

Cuando la luz de mi escáner Epson V700 ilumina mi rosa, que cuelga de un palito de bambú para que toque el vidrio, la luz no afecta el cielo raso blanco que resulta bien negro. Suerte que desde comenzé en el 2001 tenía esa ;ámpara tan útil de donde afianzo el palito de bambú.

Mi camada de fotógrafos amigos (fui fotógrafo de revista en Vancouver y en Canadá desde 1977 hasta hace poco cuando el periodismo desapareció) no tienen escáner y no comentan cuando les muestro mi impresiones. Lo hago en soledad.

Gracias a que fui amigo del artista/pintor argentino Juan Manuel Sánchez (ya fallecido) me explicó que soy un artista y tengo la compulsión de hace lo que hago sin tener que importante lo que otros opinen.

La paso bien escaneando y viviendo con mis dos gatos hermanitos Niño y Niña.

Mexico City

 

My grandmother often quoted Saint Luke, her favourite evangelist. The quote was:

"no one is a prophet in his own land" Luke 4:24 in the New Testament, where Jesus says this in his hometown of Nazareth when the people reject his teachings and him as a prophet. The phrase means that people familiar with someone often fail to recognize their greatness or value because of local bias, familiarity, or a sense of envy, leading to a lack of acceptance and honor in their own community, even if they are highly respected elsewhere.

There is something to that in me trying to be a street photographer in Vancouver. I am simply not inspired. I do know that if I were a young man and photographed an articulated bus and sat on the  photograph for 30 years, the picture would be interesting and worth money.

I do believe that if Fred Herzog returned from his oblivion to our present Vancouver he would have a photographer’s block. Those colours and neon signs he so much loved to photograph are long gone.

Before Rosemary and I moved to Vancouver with our daughters from Mexico City, we often drove to interesting towns in Mexico and even our surrounding towns had interest. I have hundreds if not thousands of those street photographs. I am now looking through some of those old negatives (because I can) to see what photographs I may have overlooked. I will place some of them with others that are indeed my favourites.

The key to taking photographs in Mexico then was to load my two cameras, a Pentacon-F and an Asahi Pentax S-3 with Kodak Tri-X. In most sunny situations 1/500 at f-16 was adequate.

Because fewer and fewer people want me to take their portraits I find myself struggling to keep my cameras operational.  I believe there is one solution. I will have to travel to Mexico or my Buenos Aire. I just might be a prophet there.

Rosemary circa Mexico 1969/70

It is difficult for me to explain my thinking process when I look back at photographs I may have taken a long time ago. The ones here I shot in Mexico and environments around 1969/70. Rosemary and I had been married since February 8, 1968. The presence of Rosemary’s sister Ruth is the clincher. Laughingly I used to tell people that Ruth had been sent by her parents to find out if I ate with a fork and knife.

I have no idea where I took these photographs, particularly the lovely ones with the doorway.

These photographs, which were in a binder that I keep with most of my Mexico photographs, is part of my current project to discover pictures that never saw the light of day. In my computer I have a large file called Family where I place as many pictures as I can find. Is for posterity, perhaps? I have no idea if anybody will be interested in them. But there is a big but here.

I have a book which fascinated Rebecca when she was a little girl. I wrote about it here. When photography was in its early stages there were some people who thought that placing a camera next to a child that was dying would somehow capture the moment the soul left the body. They were wrong but the book conveys how in those early years of the 19^th century children died in scores before they ever grew up. Sleeping Beauty

I see in these photographs something called the opposite. When I look at these two tight portraits of Rosemary I can feel her life spirit going into them. She was alive when I took the photographs. I may have given her instructions on how to pose. She is wonderfully alive in these.

And there is one more delightful detail. Sometime before I took these photographs I found a piece of small cross-shaped driftwood on Mocambo Beach in Veracruz where my mother lived. Rosemary and I often drove our VW to visit her. I inserted a little silver ring behind the little cross and through it a silver chain. Rosemary is wearing it here. And all these years later, I took it out of a jewellery box I keep in my office for the scan.

That first portrait here conveys something that Rosemary did often which I was never able to fully understand. How can someone smile and yet show sadness? 

Rosemary with Sister Ruth