Tarren

These days I tell people that I have no interest in women except for my Rosemary who died five years ago. I do welcome dialogue with women as I see them as distinctly different from me as I am a man. In this I also include people who are not of that tradition of women/men. If a trans woman thinks she is a man I accept it. Gay men are men for me.

Since I photographed my Rosemary nude in 1969 (one year after we married) I pursued the taking of photographs of women not wearing much or anything at all. I was looking for the ultimate image that would define eroticism.

Rosemary 1969

Now I stare at framed photograph of Rosemary in my bedroom and I can imagine that moment when she faced my camera. For 52 years we were companions in bed and out of bed. She never did dissuade me from taking all those photographs of so many women.

Now I can look at my photographs and memories of Rosemary and I can truthfully state that she was a perfect woman.

Because I am a Platonist:

A Platonist is a philosopher or adherent who believes that abstract objects—such as numbers, mathematical entities, and ideal forms (e.g., beauty, justice)—exist in a non-physical, non-mental realm independent of human thought and space-time. Based on Plato’s teachings, they view the physical world as an imperfect, changing reflection of these eternal, unchanging truths. Wikipedia

And Rosemary might have been one too, we believed that the quickest cure to the sadness of the loss of a dead cat was to get immediately a new one. Never was that new cat a kitten. We liked to adopt a middle-aged on as learning to mutually get along was part of the fun.

How is this Platonic? I believe that the new cat inherits from the dead cat that perfect form that I call “catness”. A bit of the dead cat shows up in the new one.

The closest I have arrived at this idea with humans and particularly with women (womaness?) is in my observation into the countless photographs that I have on women. One simply stands out. I began to photograph Tarren around 1979 and I have been taking photographs of her until most recently. She has a perfect body (in my eyes) but there is something more in her face and how she looks at my camera.

While I have stated above that I am no longer interested women except for my gone Rosemary, I could be wrong. There is something comforting in looking at my photographs of that perfect woman that is Tarren.