Anita -

In my blogs I often write that I studied philosophy in an American College in Mexico City. I was studying to be an engineer (I failed electricity) and at the same time I was taking philosophy courses with a brilliant mind Ramón Xirau. While he started with Pre-Socratics and ended with Sartre I was quite obsessed with Plato and his idea of a perfect world that our senses could never see.

A few years ago because Rosemary and I had cats we had to constantly suffer their death. We soon discovered that the fastest cure to the grief of a dead cat was a brand new one. And, especially, if it was a middle-aged rescue from the SPCA. My take was that the new cat inherited that perfection that all felines have that I call “catness”.

Since I began to photograph unclothed women in the late 70s until just about one year ago, I realized that with the death of my Rosemary on December 9, 2010, that she was the only woman I was interested in and attracted to.

A photographer has to (that is my case) keep taking photographs.  Since I have really specialized in facing my camera on a person, I quickly discovered that I wanted to somehow get that perfect humanity (that Platonic one) that we humans all possess. After all, if I am me I cannot be someone else.

This led me to the idea, that while I have most always taken portraits with a sometimes severe eye contact into my lens, I had to go further.

Whenever I now have the chance of taking photographs of a woman I want to get that which she is and I am not.

In those past years of my life in Vancouver I often got (they stopped about a year ago) phone calls from women that I did not know who wanted me to take “different” photographs of them. That was the case of a woman called Anita who called me in 2010. She posed for me twice. Once was in our Kerrisdale living room. The second time, in that living room, and in my car, when she was visibly pregnant.

This century has brought us Brazilian (as in no hair down there) pornography in Twitter/X. There is a nasty profusion on red carpets and videos of women holding a mike to their mouth, wearing next to nothing and then they move their rear ends in every possible sinuous direction.

I see my photographs with all those bits and pieces showing as less offensive and almost elegant. They now do not follow was is called “community standards.

I looked through my contact sheets of Anita and I found these two that would not offend anybody and at the same time they show in spades Anita’s Platonic essence of a woman.

And to be clear if I were to photograph a trans woman I would do as here. Trans women, if they see themselves as women, they are so.