Tarren

In spite of my advanced old age I have exciting events happening in my life. Tomorrow I will be taking photographs of a tall, blonde woman whose mother was a well-known exotic dancer in the late 70s. It seems that when her mother died and the woman looked into her diary it was only then that she found out of her mother’s former occupation.

She asked me, “Alex I want you to photograph me as if I were my mother.”

It is obvious that I cannot go back to the late 70s and 80s when I photographed most of the city’s ecdysiasts. Somehow in my photographs I have to include how my concept of women has changed. In the 80s and 90s I was obsessed with conveying my idea of what I found erotic. In some few cases the women I photographed did tell me what they thought was erotic.

Am I to shoot for the erotic tomorrow? My idea of what is erotic has vanished. The only woman I am interested in is my Rosemary who died December 9, 2020. What I especially miss are those quiet and gentle moments we shared in our bed.

This blog I wrote yesterday might convey how without knowing I did that in the 90s.

El Baile de las Sábanas Blancas

Because I shoot film and digital I will be using multiple cameras in various formats. One of my fave digital cameras is my functioning (with no sim card) iPhone3G.

There is no doubt that this about-to-be 84 old man is one very lucky old man.

The Ektachrome illustrating this blog is of my fave ecdysiast ever. She is Tarren. We communicate to this day and I have photographed her until recently. This picture taken sometime in the late 70s is the first photograph that I took of a dancer to be published (in Vancouver Magazine). I have no memory on how it happened. I still have the Mexican 8-sided mirror. That will be my first shot tomoroow.

These days I keep repeating what a friend tells me over and over, “Alex, you and I won the cosmic lottery in having been born and worked in the past century."

It what to me is the age of pornography in this 21^st century I had a curious and most pleasant situation in July/August 1993. In those days we (writers, photographers, journalists, designers, ecdysiasts, etc) would meet for lunch at noon on Thursdays at the Railway Club. There was this lovely peroxide blonde who would sit alone on an ancillary table. We all wondered who she was. One day I rustled up enough nerve and I went up to her and said, “My name is Alex, I am a photographer and I would like to photograph you nude.” Her answer was succinct, “Sure, when do you want to do it? What is your phone number?”

When she arrived at my Robson corner with Granville studio (the Farmer Building) she took all her clothes off and I was shocked to note that she had had a breast removed.

Somehow in all my photographs I never showed any breast or the little bits that get you into trouble in this century.

One of the photographs became one of my favourite ever photographs. She was on a white bed sheet on m psychiatric couch. I just photographed her lovely legs and just a bit more.

When I was a little boy my mother would say to me, “Alex, es hora del baile de las sábanas blancas.” That translates to, “Alex it is time for the dance of the white sheets.” And to bed I went.

The other photos here to me represent one of  best moments of genuine inspiration.

Top left - Rosa 'Emily Carr' - right - Rosa 'Benjamin Britten' below both l Rosa 'Gabriel Oak' 13 July 2026

As a little boy my father always spoke to me in English. In bed in the late afternoon we would sing together My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean and Onwards Christian Soldiers. He also read me stories.

When my grandmother read stories to me they were always in her impeccable Castilian. Once finished she would say, “Colorín colarado este cuento se ha acabado.” It is pretty well difficult and what it meant was,“this story is over.”

Since I began scanning the plants in my garden in 2001 I have accumulated thousands. I can safely say that that story is not over and since colorado in Spanish is a synonym for red, my grandmother's refrain is appropriate for this scan of three red roses.

Colorín colorado este cuento NO se ha acabado.

Madeleine Morris

My Kits house has no more room for framed pictures on the wall. Most of them are family portraits. Because as a portrait photographer I always wanted unsmiling eye contact, I am constantly haunted by their stares starting in my bedroom, the hallways, the kitchen, the living room, the dining room and the guest room.

Every time I look at one of them I am like Marcel  Proust dipping a madeleine into tea. I am overwhelmed by how it was I took the portrait and what I indicated to my subjects what they should do.

These days, with my newish 28 inch Acer monitor, I am browsing through my extensive files both in my computer and in my metal negative and slide files inside my 7 metal cabinets with four drawers each.

Today I explored that of Morris, Madeleine whom I photographed for many years. In the file I found this little deteriorated  3x5 inch print. I do not remember why I printed it. I found the yellowing beautiful. The yellowing happened because the glossy, plastic coated Ilford paper was not archival. The paper was manufactured to satisfy the pre-scanner ability of the paper to dry glossy without having to use those complicated glossy making dryers (I had one!). Glossy 8x10s were the only way blacks were reproduced as blacks in magazines and newspapers. The scanner made the paper irrelevant.

I call the yellowing Ilford Degeneration.

This print is lovely. You might note that Morris posed with her pet mouse.

I sometimes despair that I am unable to convince my peers of the value of my Epson V700 scanner.

Kimberly Klass

In my career as a portrait photographer in Vancouver beginning in 1977 until recently (I keep shooting portraits in my dotage), I photographed many important and famous people and the not so famous whom I met in my everyday life. Some became my friends.

Such a person (not famous) was Kimberly Klass. She came into my life as a guest in our Thursday tertulia at the Railway Club in the 80s. She was adventurous and curious. She would come to our home(which I shared with my Rosemary) in Kerrisdale as she wanted to listen to my extensive jazz collection.

I took many photographs of her. Months later she committed suicide. None of us ever found out what led her to that.

Now with my splendid 38inch wide Acer monitor I have been browsing all my photo files. When I got to Kimberly’s I was astounded at those that featured her black clothing and black stockings. With my new expertise in using my Photoshop 8 (22 year’s old) which has resulted with my constant use of it I have found a better way to show here these photographs that I took of this amazing woman.

In his poem Negro el diez, Julio Cortázar has a line - tu sombra espera tras de toda luz. That translates appropriately for these photographs as - Your shadow waits behind every light

Often in these pages I have written of the male gaze. Particularly now in this 21^st century I have grown tired of all those videos and photographs of women wearing almost no clothing holding a wireless mike to their mouth, while moving their lower extremities up and down and sideways. I am turned off by the videos of female volleyball players and gymnasts.

It would seem that I define that expression, “a man is not as old as he looks  but old when he stops looking.”

In my oficina I have a complete filing cabinet with about 600 women that posed for me not wearing much or anything at all. I was called often by women who told me, “Alex I want some different photographs.” Different was the key word they used when they wanted to pose sans clothing.

All those women that posed differently eventually gave me an edge in my editorial portraiture in being able to pose clothed subjects and to make them look graceful and comfortable.

Because I have this 28inch wide Acer monitor now I luxuriate in choosing browse instead of open when I go to any of my files. The little pictures are across that monitor and I notice pictures I may have overlooked in the past.

Many would not pass that horrible Meta term – community standards. But then how does one explain the proliferation of all those pictures in social media of women opening their legs to show either that they are wearing underwear or not?

The two photographs here might pass muster that community standard. Why? They are of a woman who had had a double mastectomy. She told me how once when she went to a community pool and was wearing no top she was told to put something on. Is that a double standard that a man in a bathing suit can show nipples but a woman without them cannot show a bare chest?

Lilium 'Lollipop' 6 July 2026

It is plainly evident that most of the people I have met in my 83 years are dead. This produces in me a constant memory of a past that cannot return.

A few days ago I saw several flowers of one of Rosemary’s lilies. There was no metal ID sign so I wondered what it was. I went into my plant scans and immediately found out it was Lily ‘Lollipop’.

Seeing the lily and knowing that Rosemary had planted it there in the back lane garden was almost like being in the presence of a ghost. I immediately connected the lily to another lollipop in my distant past. Around 1950 I was going to the American Grammar School in Buenos Aires. It was three blocks from the American School where my mother taught. It was right outside the Belgrano R train station. We took the train from our Coghlan train station (we lived in the neighbourhood by that name) to Belgrano.

Sometimes my mother would take me to a nearby ice-cream shop called Lollipop that catered to the students of the nearby American schools. It was there that I learned the delights of the ice cream soda.

In Spanish a chupete is both a lollipop and that device that babies are given to suck.

8 JuHarold Bloom & the Bishop of Hippo

The Bishop of Hippo - Floria Aemelia & the Bitch

My not quite human female cat Niña associates the noise of a spoon banged on her food tin and at around 8pm she stares at me as she knows her routine. I say, “treats”, and she immediately reacts.

It was in 2021 on CBC Radio’s excellent program Ideas that I listened to a whole hour account  on St. Augustine, the Bishop of Hippo. What immediately got to me was that he wrote that you hear a note in a song in the past, then in the present and you can predict the one in the future. I would only correct what he said that I would not apply to atonal music.

I believe that association is human talent. When I picked up this leaf on my walk to Safeway on Broadway and MacDonald I knew I was going to write this and associate a leaf that is predicting fall in the middle of summer with St. Augustine.