Bronwen - June 2&3 2013 - Pentax MX - 20mm f-4 M lens

Malibu Noir Revisited

My life with cars began - in Veracruz, Mexico in 1967. My mother told me I had to learn to drive a car. I received my first driver’s licence then so I was allowed to drive my mother’s Volkswagen Beatle. By the time I married my Rosemary on June 8 1968 my mother facilitated me with money to buy my own Beatle. We drove in that Beatle to Vancouver in 1975. During a snowstorm on Rupert Street I totalled it but we survived without injury. We then had a VW Rabbit, and a Honda Civic. My Rosemary said we had to then buy a good car (not like my two terrible Fiat X-19s which I drove like the macho I thought I was.) so we had a very large Audi with a 5-cylinder engine. Then we leased a smaller one and I bought a used Maserati Biturbo (the worst car of my life. When we could no longer afford leasing a smaller Audi (the expenses for repairing that Maserati were onerous) I told rosemary we had to buy a used car. She became preoccupied when I chose a used 6-cylinder Chevrolet Malibu, a car so good we drove with our two daughters to the south Texas ranch of my St. Edward’s High School fellow student called Michael East.

At that school a classmate who was a day student, and thus could have a car,                                    took pity on me. I did not know how to dance so I had no girlfriends. He arranged with his girlfriend and he came over with another girl and that was how I found out about sexual preliminaries in the back seat of Chevrolet Corvair. Perhaps it was that experience that led me to photograph (last count 5) women women in my cars.

When we had the Malibu we lived in a splendid corner house in Kerrisdale. It had a very large garden. Rosemary taught me to garden and to learn Greek and Latin botanical nomenclature. I was teaching a photography school called Focal Point. My class was called “The Contemporary Portrait Nude. In one of my sessions I had a fine male model called Michael. One day he recommended the school hire Bronwen. For many years I can attest that she posed for me and she inspired me to take some of the best photographs of my life.

Now with my newish 28inch-wide Acer monitor I have been looking at all those files from my past. I tell everybody I know that a photographer is as good as his/her last photographs. I still take photographs with film and digital and some of the photographs that I took of a lovely woman last week are very good.

But Bronwen was special and she inspired me to try all kinds of avant-garde techniques. In the last few days I have been looking at her file and I have made some of the photographs a bit darker or I removed specks of dust. It was then I that I knew I had an idea for this blog.

With a sneer in my face I tell my Vancouver friends that there is a type of photography in Vancouver that is much in vogue as an art form. There are photographers who with this technique are represented by very good galleries. The premise of this art form is that if you photograph a fire hydrant it means nothing. But if you photograph 100 of them then you have your show. The same applies to taking pictures of crowds. I cannot understand this. After seing 10 of these I would become bored.

In Bronwen’s file I have many photographs of her inside my Chevrolet Malibu inside our Kerrisdale garage. I used two cameras, an Asahi Pentax MX, and a Nikon FM-2. With the Pentax I shot Kodak Tri-X. The Nikon was loaded with Fuji 800ISO colour negative film. I also shot some Polaroids with my medium format Mamiya RB-67. From my records I see we had two sessions.

What is most important for me to point out here is that I discovered the when I was sitting in the driver’s seat and Bronwen was on the passenger seat my 20mm Pentax wide angle M-Lens was so rectilinearly  corrected that the first picture you see here you would never suspect that it was taken with an extreme wide angle.

Since as an art photographer ( believe I am one) I am ignored in this city (my grandmother often quoted to me St. Luke – No one is a profit in his own land) this blog will satisfy me as I believe that Bronwen is above photograph of crowds and fire hydrants.

 Should I now photograph 100 lovely Vancouver manhole covers?

No.

I must add that the Malibu was a car my Rosemary loved. When it finally blew a gasket, she, our eldest daughter and I went to Dueck’s on Marine. My Rosemary told me not to sit with them. They dealt with a woman salesperson who asked if they wanted this or that. They said “yes’ to everything. Our and now my 2017 Chevrolet Cruze (assembled in Mexico) is the best car I have ever owned. It even has a heated steering wheel which matches that other fabulous innovation of my Kitsilano home, a heated toilet seat.