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.

Budstock, 30 July, 1981- Luxford, centre one above from bottom

Bud Luxford and Ian Thom are two unlikely brothers. In visits I used to make the Vancouver Art Gallery I would ask curator Ian Thom about his brother Bud Luxford. He would sneer at me and turn around.

Bud Luxford was an (and still is) an enterprising entrepreneur of Vancouver’s punk era. He was famous for his boat cruises with punk bands (Boating with Bud) and promoting what in Vancouver we called Fuck Bands. They were called that because musicians from different bands would change places and guitarists would sing, etc. They played “for the fuck of it.”

Luxford was central to a photograph of mine that appeared in a Vancouver Magazine Christmas special in 1981. In One Ear columnist, Les Wiseman came up with the idea of me taking a Christmas photograph of a punk band for several Christmases in a row.

Recently Bud Luxford paid me a visit. He was after a photograph I took July 30, 1981 at the Commodore that featured most of the punk community. What is especially notable of the photograph is that I light it with a large softbox (with a flash) and used Kodak SO (Special Order) 115 Film which was the sharpest b+w film ever made.

Bud Luxford & The Dishrags - Left - Scout, centre -Jade, right -Dale -1981

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.