My Rosemary - Juan Manuel Fangio
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
It was not long after I got my first driver’s license (a
Veracruz one) in 1967 that I married Rosemary. I had met her at the end of that
year and we were married on 8 November 1968. I decided to teach her to drive in the
blue VW you see in the picture here. She hit a rock and that was the end of the
lesson.
I quickly found out you do not teach a marriage partner to
drive. We had to wait until we arrived in Vancouver in 1975. A Dutch man (at
the time I thought he was a saint) taught Rosemary to drive.
In all the years she ever drove (unlike this idiot macho
man) the only accidents she ever had were people bashing her parked car.
Rosemary would go to visit her mother in Brockville in
winter. At the Ottawa airport she would rent a car in the evening and drive to
Brockville in a snow storm.
That was my Rosemary.
I have written at length and often on how we humans have
this human talent to associate. Yes, I know that my cats react to making a
noise with a spoon on their tinned food. We are much better at association.
Going down or up the stairs I see many of my family portraits
every day. I smile a bit but I mostly feel melancholic. The photographs
represent moments that will not return and indicate that I now have a fractured
family situation with no more roast beef/Yorkshire Pudding Christmas dinners
(we always celebrated Christmas Eve).
When I looked at this recently gold framed sandwich
photograph of Rosemary (a fave right now), I knew I had to find some sort of
association so I could scan and write. The frame with my driver’s licenses is
in my oficina.
And so here we have it. My Rosemary was as good a driver as Argentine F1 World Champion Juan Manuel Fangio. And yes I have had accidents that did not happen in the parking lot.
Ona Grauer Sandwiches Without Mayonnaise
Tuesday, November 19, 2024
| Kodak Ektar 100
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| Kentmere 100
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| Kodak Technical Pan
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| Rollei Infrared Film
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| Ilford 3200 ISO 35mm
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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.
Grief & Potential
Sunday, November 17, 2024
| Top Rosa 'Susan Williams- Ellis' centre R. 'Mrs Oakley Fisher' right R. 'Queen of Sweden' 17 November 2024
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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 Framed in Gold
Wednesday, November 13, 2024
| Rosemary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward- 1969
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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.
All For the First Time at Yarilo's To Hope and Back
Sunday, November 10, 2024
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
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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?
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