Kodak Ektar 100

Kentmere 100

Kodak Technical Pan

Rollei Infrared Film

Ilford 3200 ISO 35mm

While I am a product of the 20th century, particularly in my profession as a photographer, I have found that the distant technology of that century can be nicely combined with that of this one.

Around 2007 I photographed the beautiful Ona Grauer for approximately one year. In my effort to tie up loose ends I have been contacting my subjects and friends in my past. I connected with Grauer who was most enthusiastic as she was going to be 49 on Saturday 16 November. She came to my house on the day before. She instructed me that she wanted to look her age and that I was not to use any kind of softening filters.

Ona Grauer then

Photography, particularly portrait photography, depends on the dependable pattern of consistency and routine. I broke that rule by deciding that I was going to photograph her with my medium format Mamiya RB-67. This camera has individual and removable film backs. I used 4 backs with four different films. To make it even more complicated I loaded a Nikon FM-2 with very fast 3200 ISO film.

Because my medium format film had ISO speeds of 100, 80 and 25 this meant that I had to be aware in how I looked at and set my two hand held Minolta meters. A further complication was that my 80 ISO Rollei Infrared Film necessitated the use of a deep red filter. I had to remember to take it out for other films and to use it when I shot with the Rollei.

Add to all that the used of a flash softbox for some of the photographs. Disaster perhaps? Not quite even though I tripped over flash cords. There was one embarrassing moment when I lifted the Nikon to my face and Grauer said, “Alex, you have the lens cap on.”

Those who only shoot with digital cameras often tell me that they can make any one picture they use into high contrast, mimic different kinds of films, do it in colour and then convert it to black and white. My argument is that a group of those different versions of the one picture are really one picture.

When I use more than one camera or different film backs the similar photographs are all unique.

To show off (just a tad) I picked two negatives from each of the five films I used and sandwiched them in a technique that I call “scanner sandwiches without mayonnaise”.

And here they are.

Post Data: One of the 120 format film for Mamiya that I shot is the now discontinued Kodak Technical Pan. It is the sharpest and least grain film ever made. I have quite a few rolls in my freezer. No local photo lab would be able to process it. I processed it! That exclamation point is appropriate as I had not processed film in 6 years. Luck was on my side and the roll developed nicely.

Top Rosa 'Susan Williams- Ellis' centre R. 'Mrs Oakley Fisher' right R. 'Queen of Sweden' 17 November 2024

Sometimes when I look at myself in a mirror, I understand that I am who I am because of the people who mentored me, influenced me and loved me. Ultimately I know that I am who I am because of my Rosemary.

I understand well (influenced by Joan Didion) that the only way to face grief is to write about it. In my case it is about Rosemary who has caused my grief because of her loss.

I calculate that over 50% of my blogs, since Rosemary died on 9 December 2020, are inspired by my thoughts about her.

Today I noticed these almost two open roses and the two buds. I know well that although they may have the potential of being able to open, they will not.

Rosemary liked all three, but special to both of us, is the yellow single tea rose, Rosa ‘Mrs. Oakley Fisher'.

After scanning these three, I would have gone upstairs to Rosemary, who in this weather, would have been on our bed, to show her. She would have smiled.

It is only now that I have come to think that potential in the future, even if it will not happen, is not too dissimilar to the concept of a memory in the past that will not again be repeated.

I have a definite and sure potential of remembering with smiles and with melancholy all those 52 years that Rosemary and I were together.

Rosemary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward- 1969

 

Because Telus is the most aggressive, intruding communications company in Canada I have to tolerate constant emails from them and text messages. I have three bills. After lots of calling and waiting I have managed to have two of them paid by automatic bank withdrawal. The third bill I go to my Kerrisdale branch of the Bank of Montreal. Why? Because I like to face a human bank representative. They are pleasant. I need that face to face.

On my way to the bank I passed by an antique store and noticed a gold frame. I purchased it because since I can print to any size in my oficina printer I can even dispense with a mat as I can put a white border around my inkjet print.

You can see the result in the scan here. The frame was almost the size of my scanner glass.

This frame will be one of the last that I can put up on my walls as there is simply not much space left. 

I took these photographs of Rosemary in Mexico City about a year after we got married. It was 1969 and these (they are cropped) represent the first nudes I ever photographed. They are not all that sharp. I used Kodak Tri-X with my Asahi Pentax S-3. I may have used a Komura 80mm lens.

Because I am a portrait photographer who happened to study philosophy for two years (1962/63) in Mexico City under Ramón Xirau I look at my portraits as a glimpse into a person’s soul where I modify Plato’s idea of a world of perfect essences that we humans only see as wavy shadows. This specially happens when I have eye contact. These are an exception as I was not yet well on my way to shooting portraits always with eye contact.

When I saw photographs of live and dead Confederate soldiers taken by Timothy O’Sullivan around 1950 I first became aware of death. I was 8 at the United States Information Service library, The Lincoln Library adjacent to the US Embassy in Buenos Aires. The soldiers looked now different from the people walking outside on Calle Florida.

Rosemary was alive when I took these photographs. I remember little of what we might have talked about or what led me to take the photographs to begin with.

Fifty six years later they are now framed with UV glass. I hope one of my daughters will appreciate them when I am long gone.

Since I am not a music critic and just a photographer I can write about a concert without any rules that I must follow. And now I enjoy, that since my photographs are not going to a magazine or newspaper, I can experiment with slow shutters with my digital Fuji X-E3.

Tonight's performance of the avant-garde Vancouver group Yarilo, which included a couple of young 13 year old actors (Farah Berkson and Benjamin Jacobson), the Yaletown String Quartet and percussionist Jonathan Bernard had me thinking of other extraordinary musical happenings in my past.

The first happened in Buenos Aires in 1950 when I was 8. My parents took me to the Teatro Colón for a performance of Arthur Rubinstein. This was my first ever classical one. The man sat down and before he began to play (perhaps because it was a Buenos Aires winter) people coughed. He waited. People coughed. He got up and faced us. With a pen or pencil in his hand he told us in Spanish, “Cough, cough!” He then sat down to play. He could not and it was then we found out he was drunk. He left the stage and returned 45 minutes later. I was told he was brilliant.

Perhaps 20 years ago I was driving my car and listening to CBC Radio. They began to play a Beethoven Bagatelle. I had to stop my car to listen to it. I was wonderful. Because I wanted to share my experience I called my friend Linda Lee Thomas, the former  pianist of the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, with my primitive cellular phone. Her remark to me when she answered, “Oh, Alex, to hear something for the first time! I am jealous.”

And so it was last night. Every composition I heard was for the first time. With the proliferation of the availability of music now, I feel sad that my mother’s desert island music consisted only of Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. She would have never heard of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. What would she have said to me when Leslie Dala came to my house the day of my birthday, August 31, 2020 (my wife was visiting our daughter in Lillooet) and I was depressed. Dala told me to sit down in my piano room ( I have a refurbished 130 year old Chickering baby grand) and played the variations for me?

Last night was a refreshing performance which since it included some narration, it became theater. There is one more experience that I want to share here.

A couple of years ago while listening to CBC Radio Ideas they featured theologian and saint, St. Augustine. Augustine wrote that when you listen to music you hear that first note in the past, the next one in the present and the third you can predict in the future. It is obvious that Augustine did not have any knowledge of the yet to be invented atonal music!

And so last night I could not predict any of the next notes (except perhaps with some of the Phillip Glass compositions). My experience was one of constant surprise.

Because I am 82, I can state here that I never ever want to hear Bach’s Double Violin Concerto. It will more than suffice for me to go to a performance of his 6 Suites for Unaccompanied Violin that I heard this year and last played by Marc Destrubé who was present last night.

The vocal parts by the two young performers were based on author Kathy Kacer's book To Hope and Back, all about that ill fated SS St.Lois. She was present and is in one of the opening photographs.

Because I had met and photographed composer Iman Habibi in 2011 all I could do was to smile when I listened to his Radiant Light and imagine that poem by the 13 year-old Elizabeth Woods (was not able to find it).

Iman Habibi & Kethleen Allan

I was wowed by the two pianists, Jane Hayes and Anna Levy playing Gheorghi Arnaoudov’s Two Litanies for Two Pianos and Percussion (with Jonathan Bernard on percussion) and Philip Glass’s Four Movements for Two Pianos. These piano pieces were nicely interrupted by the two 13 year old actors.

I had never been to a performance by the Yaletown String Quartet. Amazingly they imitated to perfection the noise and whistles of a stream train and the sirens of a bombing mission in 1939.

The whole concert/performance centred on a ship the SS St.Louis that circled Cuba and the US with a boatload of Jews and was unable to find a save heaven. It had to return to Germany with the obvious consequences.

The program was all about the Jewish Holocaust. That it all happened then and stuff is happening now was what made the evening a sobering one.

But there is something that I am looking forward. South African music critic Willoughby Blew has unearthed a long lost version of John Cage’s 4’33” for two pianos. Could I persuade Jane Hayes and Anna Levy to tackle it next year?