Niña

My male cat Niño in the morning of June 12 was on my bed with his twin sister Niña, when I touched him he did not respond. To my horror his eyes were open and did not focus. He did not yet have rigor mortis.

Since then Niña seems to have known of her loss and became extra affectionate with me. Of late she has been adopting some of Niño’s habits. He was allowed on my red table cloth dinner table. He would stare at me around 7:45pm knowing that I would go into my bedside drawer and take out a handful of treats.

Because I consider myself to be a Platonist I believe in the philosopher’s concept of essences. Since Rosemary and I had many cats since 1977, when one would die we would immediately go to the SPCA to adopt another middle-aged cat. We liked the mutual adaptation. It was part of the fun.

Somehow the new cat would have characteristics of the dead cat. One day my Portland baroque bass player told me something that I have not forgotten. “Alex cats have in their genes the memory of having been petted by Egyptian pharaohs.

I am convinced that Niña understood the concept of death.

Sometimes I tell people seriously (but it is a joke that I am thinking of becoming a trans woman so I can then be an authentic cat lady. Some believe me.

With my Rosemary (we were married for 52 years) gone on December 9, 2020 and with the death of Niño I live alone. But I understand that I am not completely alone. I baby talk Niña, who responds with little noises. She keeps me busy with her routines. I feel that I am useful.

When I went to a baroque concert on July 1 when I left at a back alley this black cat was staring at me. I was compelled to take his portrait. And yes a portrait is usual of persons but then I am convinced of the humanity of a cat.

Lauri Stallings

A couple of days ago I wrote a blog called Do It Differently. It was about taking portraits of musicians with their instruments while avoiding clichés. The violinist Karen Gerbrecht and I coined the expression “the anti-violinist.

I worked with modern dancer (now in Atlanta) Lauri Stallings when she was in Ballet BC with the subject “the anti-ballerina”. Too often we discussed how ballerinas are often compared to swans. Stallings told me that ballerinas had periods and they sweated.

I was lucky to have met Stallings who moved to Georgia and started her own company.

With Hosta ' Forbidden Fruit'

My grandmother María de los Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena - 1950 Buenos Aires

 

December 9, 2020 was a fatalistic date in my life. That is when my wife Rosemary with whom I had been married for 52 years died. Six minutes before she died she asked, “Am I dying?” I was unable to respond. In some ways once she died my family of two daughters and two granddaughters somehow fractured.

My eldest granddaughter whom Rosemary and I took around the world I see only twice a year (once at Christmas). She does not answer my phone calls or my texts. The younger sister Lauren I see rarely. I am not a grandfather, but an old man.

My youngest daughter told me she does not read my blog (6959 to date) because she does not want to become addicted to her phone. My other daughter, Alexandra lives in remote Lillooet and I may see her about five times a year.

Last night I did a Powerpoint presentation that was autobiographical on how I got into photography at Cineworks. My youngest daughter, who would have been my only family to attend was very busy at her job and told me that she had no makeup or proper clothing to attend. I had given her money for Euber.

The presentation went well but I was melancholic knowing that today I would be faced with emptiness after the fact. Neither of my daughters called to find out how my presentation had been received.

It is here that I want to point out how close I was to my maternal grandmother. She told me all kinds of advice related to the Don Quijote and Spanish refrains she learned when she was educated in Valencia. The one comment of hers that applies to me at my age of 83 is “un cero a la izquierda”. That translates to “a zero to the left”. I will explain that in this way”

0.1, 00.1, 000.1 are all the same. After that initial zero the rest are not necessary.

In short I feel that I am a cero a la izquierda. With only slight humour I tell people that I will soon compose a country and western song called Obsolete- Redundant-Retired and Inconsequential. With the money I have in the bank, my life insurance and my all-paid Kits home I will be most useful to my family when I am dead.

And so it goes.

Hosta 'Antioch' 3 July 2026

To illustrate this blog I am placing an unusual version of my plant scans. I have at least 3000 of them since I started in 2001. For this one I reversed the scan of the hosta flower and made it a negative.

One of these and perhaps ten more might be seen as art, But 3000 of them? As it is when people praise my plant photographs they lose interest the moment I tell them that they are scanographs and that I am a scanographer.

No gallery in this city gives me the time of day. Perhaps when I meet my oblivion my scans will stand out from those crowds.

A 

Karen Gerbrecht

I tell photographers in this century that they lack the push of pushy art directors and editors from that past century that made me take photographs in a ways I did not want to try  and invariably they were right.

One of them Vancouver Magazine art director Rick Staehling (now gone) spent fortunes buying the best American magazines of the 80s. He would show me a portrait from Esquire and would tell me, “Alex try doing something like it.”

Few now know that the first published photograph was one of the Steinway Building in 1873 that appeared in a long gone New York City newspaper. It was possible because the halftone process (lots of dots) had been invented. That photograph immediately linked photography with the arts and not long after it began a competition between magazines and newspapers to publish very good original work.

Now with journalism moribund the only good photographs that I see are in my daily delivered, hard-copy New York Times.

One of the words often used by art director Staehling and his successor, Chris Dahl was, “Do it differently.” This involved complex lighting and cameras of multiple formats or swivel lens panoramics.

The digital cameras of this century are like the 19^th century Colt .45, the Peacemaker, that put all the people who used them on the same foot.

It was in that last century that I met an extraordinary violinist, Karen Kerbrecht who played the instrument in the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra. With her we came up with the idea of avoiding the clichés of a person with their instrument We called our experiment “the anti-violinist”.

Now that I have a wide (28 inches) and fabulous Acer monitor I am able to go to any file and instead of opening I choose browse. I then see all the little pictures in the file across my screen. When I punched in Karen Gerbrecht I found one that somehow had escaped my notice. I shot it with a now long gone Polaroid Instant Negative film. I will perhaps place a couple more.

At a future date I will do another blog which I will title the Anti-Dancer. I worked with Lauri Stallings who left Vancouver and has a dance company in Atlanta.

Rosa 'Susan Williams-Ellis' 30 June 2026

Robert Frost – 1874 - 1963

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

In 1962 I was going to an American college in Mexico City, Mexico City College. One of my classes was presided by a man who had been a friend of poet Robert Frost, and astoundingly he looked like the poet. I was much too ignorant (and stupid) to appreciate his class so I sat in the back and yawned constantly.

It was only after I started writing these blogs in 2006 that I started associating my photographs and plant scans to poets and writers.

Today I saw this bloom of Rosa ‘Susan Williams-Ellis’ (and English Rose). In all my years of scanning roses (I may have at least 4000 plant scans) I was struck that this bloom was perfection. It was perfection even if you note the centre is slightly yellow and there is a tinge of red in one of the petals.

To make this perfection even more of a Platonic essence, when I saw the scan on my new (but used) 28 inch wide Acer monitor, it looked exactly like the rose itself.

I just wish I could return to that unnamed English Literature professor whose name I long forgot and tell him that I have found my way.

Rosa 'Ketchup & Mustard' 30 June 2026

My memory has played strange tricks in my years of existence. As an example when I was born I remember that a photographer with a magnesium flash almost blinded my entrance into this world.

When I was 8 in 1950 in Buenos Aires we had a live-in housekeeper called Mercedes Bazaldúa. One morning my mother told her, “Mercedes ve a la almacén de la esquina y pedí una botella de cátsup.”

Not long after that we were invited for dinner at the home of my Uncle Harry who was my father’s older brother. I watched him put sugar into his mixture of Colman’s Mustard. Since then I always use Coleman’s (also called Keen’s) and I put a bit of sugar.

Uncle Harry had been born in Manchester and he and his parents moved to Buenos Aires in 1901. At the time the custom in my family was that the firstborn male would have the middle name of Waterthouse. When my grandparents and Uncle Harry arrived to Buenos Aires my father found out that his parents had gotten married in Buenos Aires. He immediately told himself that his brother was a bastard and that he, my father George was the true first born. So he started using the name Waterhouse. When I was born he tried to have the name Waterhouse in my name George Alexander. At the time names in a foreign language that could be translated into Spanish, were prohibited to stand in the foreign language. When my father then insisted on Waterhouse, he slipped a coima (a bribe) an told the registrar that my surname was Waterhouse-Hayward.

And yes I eat my French Fries with Catsup.