Portia Winters - & left Colleen Hughes

In that perfect world there were essences.

I have modified my Platonism because of women and cats. My Portland bassist friend Curtis Daily once told me that all cats have in their genes a memory of having been petted by Egyptian pharaohs. My Rosemary and I when one of our cats would die (we had many beginning in 1977, we would immediately adopt a middle-aged cat from the SPCA. We enjoyed the mutual adaptation. We also discovered that somehow the new cat had something of the old cat. I identified that as the essence of being a cat.

Since I began taking photographs of women in Mexico City beginning in 1967 with portraits of my Rosemary and nudes of her in 1969 I have photographed thousands of women.

Here are two that stand out in my mind (besides my Rosemary) of being extremely sure of themselves. The woman on the left, Portia Winters was an ecdysiast that I photographed for a Vancouver business magazine called Equity. The article was called Sex Sells and it was all about the business side of the profession. I took photographs of Winters in the Number 5 Orange dressing room. I may have been one of the few men in Vancouver allowed to take photographs in them. With camera in hand I followed Winters’s routines. I seemed to be invisible to her. In this photograph of her I see a woman sure of herself. She knows who she is and what she is.

The second woman, Colleen Hughes, is a friend who lives in Edmonton. I once photographed her with her baby boy in my tub. The photograph was the back cover of Reader’s Digest. I took many photographs of her including some in Lighthouse Park. Others I took in her house when she was living in Vancouver. This photograph is another example of a woman who has that perfect essence of being a woman.

I would only add that she is the essence of a film noir woman.