Damion - October 1988

One of the courses I took in college was called Logic. Now in this new year of 2026 I don’t see any of it anywhere. Perhaps it has to do with what may have been my idea of logic back in 1962.

On the little TV that I watch, I am met by a barrage of women singing with a microphone while wearing next to nothing and moving those lower areas back and forth. Red carpet situations even in my supposedly refined NYTimes is full of photographs of these “influencers” wearing little body coverage.

My social media algorithms in Twitter and in Facebook do provide me with my interests in art, Argentine literature, Mexican politics, etc, but in Facebook there are these reels that show what look like underage Chinese girls with pink skin showing lots of it. And Twitter has lots of moving almost bare bums.

In that past century when you did not like something you read in the newspaper you would tell yourself that you would write a letter to the editor. I seldom wrote them. Now with social media those complaints have escalated to four-letter verbiage and unkind criticism.

In that other century we had many galleries in Vancouver that featured photography. I had the idea in October 1988 to photograph women at home wearing nothing. The show was called Homebodies/ Woman Revealed.

The process once each woman had agreed to my idea was for me to ring their home bell. They would invite me in and serve me a cup of coffee or tea. I would look around and thought of a scenario.

 In the photograph here I feature a lovely Chinese woman, now dead, called Damion. Because she was Chinese I took many photographs of her wearing my mother’s silk Mandarin coat. In the end I decided to take her portrait having tea and surrounded by her stuff in her living room. When I looked at my contact sheet in order to scan one of the negatives for this blog I could not find one that did not show a bit of a nipple. I corrected that with my 22-year-old Photoshop 8.

I am sure that in this century a young, an undiscovered Grace Kelly would not have a chance for any fame.

I see in the photograph no eroticism. Damion looks dignified and sure of herself. Yet there is no place in our Vancouver where I could safely show this photograph without being lambasted.

My friend Abraham Rogatnick died in 2009. A few months before he told me, “Alex, I am not long for this world. I am glad.”

Somehow Rogatnick saw it coming. 

A young yet-to-be-discovered Grace Kelly would not have a chance of any fame in this century.