Baritone Tom Fox - March 2001

In this century of emojification (my coinage) people rarely comment on what they see unless it is a critical one. They post photographs and pictures in social media without explaining why or how the image may have affected their life.

Because the halftone process was not invented until 1873 photographs could never appear in magazines or newspapers. You either held them in your hands or saw them hanging at a gallery. Some appeared as photogravures in the front pieces of books.

The first photograph that appeared in a now long gone NYCity newspaper was of the Steinway Building. The photograph was accompanied by copy (writing). That started a symbiotic relationship between photographs and illustrations with magazines and newspapers.

In this century that is being forgotten and many think that a photograph does not need an explanation. Sometimes photographers who specialize in tight photographs of bald eagles (this activity will disappear with AI) like to explain in great detail the equipment that was used.

For me, since I specialized in magazine and newspaper photography, the explanation for my photograph was the essay or article in the magazine.

Now with all those magazines and newspapers about gone how would anybody judged or comment on the photograph seen here?

It is a portrait that I took of American opera baritone in March 2001. Why is he holding a ship’s wheel? He appeared in Richard Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman.

I easily projected with my focusing spotlight a cloud scene using a metal gobo. But what of the ship’s wheel? I went to the Maritime Museum and asked my then friend Jim Delgado if I could bring Fox over for the photograph.But I must add that I had to take a grey background paper (large) to place behind Fox for my cloud projection. Luckily at the time Rosemary and I owned a large Audi.

And that was it.

9 January 2025

I do not believe that there is an equivalent term, daughtered, to match mothered. The fact is that this widowed old man is pleasantly daughtered by my two daughters Ale and Hilary.

A few years before Rosemary died on December 9, 2020 we did lots of activities together. It was important to have our daily breakfast in bed routine after feeding Niña and Niño. Our breakfast (who cares about crumbs?) involved reading our hard copy NY Times and Vancouver Sun. There was other obvious stuff we did in bed. In fact we did this obvious stuff until about 3 months before Rosemary died.

Central to our life together was our bathroom with its fine tub. We liked to use it lots and we even indulged in bathing together. Our toes were important for this activity.

My daughter Hilary knew that I liked to read books and the NYTimes in the tub so she bought me a nice device that rests on the tub that can handle reading material and a large mug of strong tea. After Rosemary died I relegated the device to one side of the toilet.

Tonight when I noticed it I decided to use it again. I was delighted by it, and now it will be a permanent fixture of my daily bath.

While some might not agree with my daily tub baths (unsanitary?) I have to explain that my Toto bathroom facilities include a tub with a Jacuzzi. Using it helps relieve a lot of my arthritis.

 I take many supplements in the morning provided by Hilary including fish oil for my joints etc. Thank you Hilary for daughtering me.

“Humankind lingers unregenerately  in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.” First paragraph, first chapter of On Photography

It was in 1978 that I discovered Susan Sontag’s book and I am constantly going into it for fresh reference. A year ago at the lovely bookstore Nooroongji in Granville Island I found a lovely little book by Sontag I did not know she had written.

I am now re-reading it and I have come to the conclusion that it represents all that is in her On Photography in a concise form. Through war photographs she explores truth and credibility.

The photograph I have here I could tell you was a kidnapping I happened to photograph when I was downtown one evening. Many might believe me. The fact is that Harvey Southam’s Equity (a fine business magazine that was) hired me to shoot a fake kidnapping. In all I took a whole roll (36 exposures) of very fast Kodak b+w film.

To me the photograph represents Sontag’s point about credibility well and were she alive she would probably write on how AI has affected the credibility of photographs. Someone in the past century wrote that in court the only kind of photographic evidence that might have been accepted was a Polaroid.

Many of my photographer friends object when I tell them that a very early version of AI was the first Adobe Photoshop that was introduced in 1990. It was then that photographers could put penguins in the Sahara Desert.

I have written about AI in relation to photography here. I insist in believing that portrait photographers with a personal style will survive a while longer. I will not be around (happily) when that is no longer true.

Artificial Intelligence - My Take 

September 1996

 In that past century in 1996 my friend Ian McGuffie and I had a third photographer friend we hanged out with. It was only when she was about to leave for Toronto that I noticed that Patrice Bilawka was a beautiful woman. In that century you could approach a woman you did not know with the line, “Hi, I am a photographer. I would like to photograph you.” In that century my record was close to 100%.

In the case of Bilawka I photographed her twice. She wanted to show all and this I did. I will put here some of the photographs that would pass with censorship chaps. 

It is difficult to believe that a 35 mm camera (and in my case here a medium format one) with film (Ilford FP-4Plus) would take me to such wonderful moments. While  they are memories they are also had copy b+w negatives. It happened.

This sort of photography disappeared with black phones that you could plunk  down hard when you became angry.

It was a better world. And Bilawka is dealing with these present problems in Europe. She is a psychologist.

The photograph of Bilawka being made up is one of my all-time favourites. I was waiting in another room. My Mamiya RB-67 was on a tripod. I quickly slipped in a 250mm telephoto and knowing the approximate correct exposure took this and others, too.

William Shakespeare - the Cobbe portrait - 1610

Porque Canadá y los E.E.U.U. representan una zona donde el inglés manda, parece haber poco conocimiento de los escritores latinoamericanos como Jorge Luís Borges.

Because Canada and the US represent a zone where English is king, there seems to be little knowledge or interest in the literature of the rest of the continent.

Mi conocimiento de la existencia de Guillermo Shakespeare comenzó en la Ciudad de México en 1953 cuando yo tenía 1 años. Mi mamá, abuela y yo habíamos llegado de Buenos Aires y rentamos una casa en la Calle Guillermo Shakespeare en la colonia de Nueva Anzures. Cuando tomábamos un taxi le indicábamos al ruletero que nos llevara a la Calle de Sha-ques-peah-rhe.

My first awareness of the existence of William Shakespeare began in Mexico City in 1953. My mother, grandmother and I had moved from Buenos Aires and we rented a home on Calle Guillermo Shakespeare in the Nueva Anzures. When we took taxis we would tell the driver to take us to “la calle Shawh-kes-peh-ah-rhe."

My favourite moment related to Shakespeare happened when I photographed Kenneth Branagh after having seen his long version of his film, Hamlet.

Mi momento favorito relacionado con Shakespeare fue cuando fotografié al actor/director Kenneth Branagh después de ver su película,versión larga, de Hamlet.

Kenneth Branagh 

Hace unas semanas mi hija Hilary y yo vimos la película Hamnet. Nos encantó. Al verla y notar el actor con el papel de Shakespeare no podía parar de pensar de la hermosa definición de quien era Shakespeare de Jorge Luís Borges. No creo que haya una mejor que ésta.

A few weeks ago my daughter Hilary and I enjoyed the film Hamnet. While watching the actor who played Shakespeare I could not stop thinking on the beautiful Jorge Luís Borges definition of Shakespeare. I do not believe that there is a better one.

 Everything and Nothing  J. L. Borges

 There was no one in him; behind his face (which even in the poor paintings of the period is unlike any other) and his words, which were copious, imaginative, and emotional, there was nothing but a little chill, a dream not dreamed by anyone. At first he thought everyone was like him, but the puzzled look on a friend’s face when he remarked on that emptiness told him he was mistaken and convinced him forever that an individual must not differ from his species. Occasionally he thought he would find in books the cure for his ill, and so he learned the small Latin and less Greek of which a contemporary was to speak. Later he thought that in the exercise of an elemental human rite he might well find what he sought, and he let himself be initiated by Anne Hathaway one long June afternoon. At twenty-odd he went to London. Instinctively, he had already trained himself in the habit of pretending that he was someone, so it would not be discovered that he was no one. In London he hit upon the profession to which he was predestined, that of the actor, who plays on stage at being someone else. His playacting taught him a singular happiness, perhaps the first he had known; but when the last line was applauded and the last corpse removed from the stage, the hated sense of unreality came over him again. He ceased to be Ferrex or Tamburlaine and again became a nobody. Trapped, he fell to imagining other heroes and other tragic tales. Thus, while in London’s bawdyhouses and taverns his body fulfilled its destiny as body, the soul that dwelled in it was Caesar, failing to heed the augurer’s admonition, and Juliet, detesting the lark, and Macbeth, conversing on the heath with the witches, who are also the fates. Nobody was ever as many men as that man, who like the Egyptian Proteus managed to exhaust all the possible shapes of being. At times he slipped into some corner of his work a confession, certain that it would not be deciphered; Richard affirms that in his single person he plays many parts, and Iago says with strange words, “I am not what I am.” His passages on the fundamental identity of existing, dreaming, and acting are famous.

Twenty years he persisted in that controlled hallucination, but one morning he was overcome by the surfeit and the horror of being so many kings who die by the sword and so many unhappy lovers who converge, diverge, and melodiously agonize. That same day he disposed of his theater. Before a week was out he had returned to the village of his birth, where he recovered the trees and the river of his childhood; and he did not bind them to those others his muse had celebrated, those made illustrious by mythological allusions and Latin phrases. He had to be someone; he became a retired impresario who has made his fortune and who interests himself in loans, lawsuits, and petty usury. In this character he dictated the arid final will and testament that we know, deliberately excluding from it every trace of emotion and of literature. Friends from London used to visit his retreat, and for them he would take on again the role of poet.

The story goes that, before or after he died, he found himself before God and he said: “I, who have been so many men in vain, want to be one man: myself.” The voice of God replied from a whirlwind: “Neither am I one self; I dreamed the world as you dreamed your work, my Shakespeare, and among the shapes of my dream are you, who, like me, are many persons—and none.” From Dreamtigers, by Jorge Luis Borges, translated by Mildred Boyer

 Todo y nada – Jorge Luís Borges

Nadie hubo en él; detrás de su rostro (que aun a través de las malas pinturas de la época no se parece a ningún otro) y de sus palabras, que eran copiosas, fantásticas y agitadas, no había más que un poco de frío, un sueño no soñado por alguien. Al principio creyó que todas las personas eran como él, pero la extrañeza de un compañero, con el que había empezado a comentar esa vacuidad, le reveló su error y le dejó sentir para siempre, que un individuo no debe diferir de su especie. Alguna vez pensó que en los libros hallaría remedio para su mal y así aprendió el poco latín y menos griego de que hablaría un contemporáneo; después consideró que en el ejercicio de un rito elemental de la humanidad, bien podía estar lo que buscaba y se dejó iniciar por Anne Hathaway, durante una larga siesta de junio. A los veintitantos años fue a Londres. Instintivamente, ya se había adiestrado en el hábito de simular que era alguien, para que no se descubriera su condición de nadie; en Londres encontró la profesión a la que estaba predestinado, la del actor, que en un escenario, juega a ser otro, ante un concurso de personas que juegan a tomarlo por aquel otro. Las tareas histriónicas le enseñaron una felicidad singular, acaso la primera que conoció; pero aclamado el último verso y retirado de la escena el último muerto, el odiado sabor de la irrealidad recaía sobre él. Dejaba de ser Ferrex o Tamerlán y volvía a ser nadie. Acosado, dio en imaginar otros héroes y otras fábulas trágicas. Así, mientras el cuerpo cumplía su destino de cuerpo, en lupanares y tabernas de Londres, el alma que lo habitaba era César, que desoye la admonición del augur, y Julieta, que aborrece a la alondra, y Macbeth, que conversa en el páramo con las brujas que también son las parcas. Nadie fue tantos hombres como aquel hombre, que a semejanza del egipcio Proteo pudo agotar todas las apariencias del ser. A veces, dejó en algún recodo de la obra una confesión, seguro de que no la descifrarían; Ricardo afirma que en su sola persona, hace el papel de muchos, y Yago dice con curiosas palabras no soy lo que soy. La identidad fundamental de existir, soñar y representar le inspiró pasajes famosos.

Veinte años persistió en esa alucinación dirigida, pero una mañana le sobrecogieron el hastío y el horror de ser tantos reyes que mueren por la espada y tantos desdichados amantes que convergen, divergen y melodiosamente agonizan. Aquel mismo día resolvió la venta de su teatro. Antes de una semana había regresado al pueblo natal, donde recuperó los árboles y el río de la niñez y no los vinculó a aquellos otros que había celebrado su musa, ilustres de alusión mitológica y de voces latinas. Tenía que ser alguien; fue un empresario retirado que ha hecho fortuna y a quién le interesan los préstamos, los litigios y la pequeña usura. En ese carácter dictó el árido testamento que conocernos, del que deliberadamente excluyó todo rasgo patético o literario. Solían visitar su retiro amigos de Londres, y él retomaba para ellos el papel de poeta.

La historia agrega que, antes o después de morir, se supo frente a Dios y le dijo: Yo, que tantos hombres he sido en vano, quiero ser uno y yo. La voz de Dios le contestó desde un torbellino: Yo tampoco soy; yo soñé el mundo como tú soñaste tu obra, mi Shakespeare, y entre las formas de mi sueño estabas tú, que como yo eres muchos y nadie.