Isis

Kathleen Deas

 In that other century, particularly when we were living in Kerrisdale I would tell my Rosemary, “I am going into my darkroom for a while.” What I did there was to fiddle, although a loftier term would be to experiment. One experiment was a complete accident that I have never repeated. I put an exposed 8x10 photographic paper of an ecdysiast friend called Isis into the developer tray. The phone rang so I turned the light to answer when I realized my mistake. I quickly turned it off and I was rewarded by a perfectly solarized  print.(Man Ray pioneered this technique).

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

Because living alone with two cats produces a lot of idle time I experiment further in this 21^st century in my well lit oficina. Why do I do this? I like that American expression, “Why does a dog lick its di..? Because it can.”

The other photograph here is a sandwich of the now gone Polaroid Instant Negatives. In that past century, without a scanner, all I could do was to print them. Now here I put the two sort of sided by side and scanned them.

I hope that these images do not bark as I am not yet a dog. But I can…