Rosemary and Rosa 'Queen of Sweeden' 25 July 2024

 

I could not find my Weston exposure meter! The situation was desperate: the low sun was trailing the edge of clouds in the west, and shadow would soon dim the white crosses ... I suddenly realized that I knew the luminance of the Moon – 250 cd/ft2. Using the Exposure Formula, I placed this value on Zone VII ... Realizing as I released the shutter that I had an unusual photograph which deserved a duplicate negative, I quickly reversed the film holder, but as I pulled the darkslide, the sunlight passed from the white crosses; I was a few seconds too late! The lone negative suddenly became precious. Ansel Adams

A simpler explanation for the photograph that Adams took – Moonrise – Hernandez – New Mexico is that the moon was having a sunny day. Photographers in the last century used a rule called the sunny sixteen. If you had 100 ISO film in your camera and you wanted to photograph a scene in full sunlight the right exposure was f-16 at 1/125 second (or f-11 at 1/250 and so on)

In this century, with the proliferation of the smart phone the concept of a shutter speed is fading into memory (perhaps).

Every day of my solitary existence with my two cats my wife Rosemary is in my mind. I saw the lovely bloom of Rosa ‘Queen of Sweden’ and I wanted to scan it and to somehow connect the scan with my memory of Rosemary.

I have a negative file of family pictures I took early in Mexico. I found one that was most interesting as Rosemary has pigtails. I have no memory of taking the picture or that she had ever worn pigtails. The negative is I a file with photographs that look like I took in either Guanajuato or Michocán.

As I looked the picture I noticed that the background was over exposed. I modified the sunny 16 rule to accommodate the fact that Rosemary was in a shadow. My exposure might have been 1/125 at f-8. In order to get more detail, when I scanned the negative for this blog I worked on it with my 19-year-old Photoshop-8.

The whole action made me think that while the photograph was taken perhaps at 1/125 of a second, I am spending more time looking at the resulting scan. Was my memory of the original photograph also one of 1/125 second?

Some years ago, in the late 80s when I shot for logging company annual reports I charged $3500 per day, plus film expenses and mileage. An enterprising and perhaps funny engineer told me, “Alex, you charge $3500 per day and so much per hour. I calculate that you took 50 photographs at 1/125 of a second. I will calculate that in total time and pay you accordingly. It was really a joke. But it has made me think a lot today.

I have of late been using ½ second exposures with my digital camera to photograph rock concerts, new-music and dance.

Can this kind of photography be done with a phone? Is there an app that applies slow shutters with a phone?

This Friday 26 July, 2024 I am giving a PowerPoint presentation (my third one) at the C41Café on the corner of Bayswater and 4^th Ave (2948 4^th Ave).

I have been using  Powerpoint to impart my photographic knowledge to people who might be interested. At my almost age of 82 I would like to lighten my brain.

The title of Friday’s presentation is A Panorama of Panoramics. I will show my extensive use of the 35 mm swivel lens panoramic, the Japanese Widelux and the superb Russian Horizont. I will also show my photos taken with the German Noblex 175 that used 120 film and made a huge negative or slide. I will also demonstrate the panoramic capabilities (and they are extensive) of my mirrorless Fuji X-E3.

The reason I have shot so many swivel lens panoramic photographs is that I worked for magazines that had pushy (that was a good quality) that always wanted something that was different. When I combined Kodak Infrared Film with the panoramics the results were different.

One day in the last century, pushy Vancouver Magazine art director Chris Dahl told me, “Alex I want you to take some Vancouver skyline photographs. I want you to use your Widelux and please jiggle it every once in a while." The results were indeed different and they pleased me, too.

I will bring some framed Widelux Kodak Infrared photographs that I did of the Vancouver botanical gardens. After the job, the editor of Western Living told me, “Alex how would you like to write a monthly garden column for us?” I did for two years. That is the power of diversity in photography.

If death is annihilation, says Epicurus, then it is ‘nothing to us.’ Epicurus’ main argument for why death is not bad is contained in the Letter to Menoeceus and can be dubbed the ‘no subject of harm’ argument. If death is bad, for whom is it bad? Not for the living, since they’re not dead, and not for the dead, since they don’t exist. His argument can be set out as follows:

 Death is annihilation.

The living have not yet been annihilated (otherwise they wouldn’t be alive).

Death does not affect the living.

So, death is not bad for the living.

For something to be bad for somebody, that person has to exist, at least.

The dead do not exist.

Therefore, death is not bad for the dead.

Therefore death is bad for neither the living nor the dead.

A second Epicurean argument against the fear of death, the so-called ‘symmetry argument,’ is recorded by the Epicurean poet Lucretius. He says that anyone who fears death should consider the time before he was born. The past infinity of pre-natal non-existence is like the future infinity of post-mortem non-existence; it is as though nature has put up a mirror to let us see what our future non-existence will be like. But we do not consider not having existed for an eternity before our births to be a terrible thing; therefore, neither should we think not existing for an eternity after our deaths to be evil.

In 1962 and 1963 I studied philosophy as one of my elective courses at Mexico City College. My professor, Ramón Xirau, not quite yet known then, is now (he died in 2018) one of the most eminent thinkers and intellectuals of Mexico.

Ramón Xirau 1994 - Lucinda Irrustia - oil on canvas

Xirau started with the Pre-Socratic Philosophers and two years later ended with Sartre.

I was most affected by two philosophers; one was the genius of materialism, Epicurus and the other his opposite Plato. Since then my life has been one of me comparing and contrasting the thoughts of these two men.

Cratylus & Plato 

Catness

Roseness 

Minutes before my Rosemary died on December 9, 2020 she asked us, “Am I dying?” I was unable to answer and I have been affected by that question since.

I will delve (I am about to be 82 so I can) a tad into my religious beliefs. I was educated in a Roman Catholic family by my grandmother. From 1958 to 1961 I went to a Roman Catholic boarding school run by Brothers of Holy Cross (the same congregation as in Indiana’s Notre Dame. My teachers were superb and especially Brother Edwin Reggio,C.S.C. who taught us religion. Years later I figured out he taught us theology and delved lots into Aristotelian and Thomistic philosophy. He prepared me to face Xirau.

With my grandmother María de los Dolores de Irureta Goyena

Brother Edwin Reggio,C.S.C.

Rosemary’s question is one that none of us can answer unless we are “lucky” to be in a situation where we do not die in our sleep or in an accident but we are in bed with time to reflect. Would we ever ask the question Rosemary asked us? What did she know then?

Both Rosemary and I did not believe we would ever see each other again. My thoughts on oblivion are straight from Epicurus.

I have a friend who is an avid believer in reincarnation. I tell her that if before I was Alex I was a hippopotamus and don’t remember I was one, and when I die should I become a camel that does not remember Alex of what use is reincarnation?

I am a firm believer in the Epicurean Symmetry Argument. The thought that I will not ever see Rosemary again is a sad thought.

Siouxie Sioux- 1981

Les Wiseman - 1989

In my almost 82 years of existence I have had many mentors who set me straight on my path as a photographer. I am not attempting to show how humble I am. I just want to express that perhaps my only talent has been that I tended to accept suggestions even if some of them, like the ones from very good art directors, were pushy.

My career in taking photographs of rock bands might not have had the success I eventually had. It was sometime in 1972 at an American high school in Mexico City where my students asked me, “Mr. Hayward, what do you think of Alice Cooper?” I answered, “Who is she?”

And so it was, that in 1979, I met Les Wiseman in Vancouver at Vancouver Magazine. We were to work together in a monthly column called In One Ear. He told me, “If you are going to like heavy metal it will have to be Motorhead. And you must like Lou Reed.”

It did not take me long to figure out that he was a serious snob. He made me one.

Such was his credibility and reputation that we had access to all the rock stars that came to Vancouver, either backstage, or in their hotel rooms.

One memorable afternoon he interviewed Siouxie Sioux in her hotel room. I was there, too. In those years I would bring a roll of gray seamless paper and a light. I took 20 photographs and one more of her with Wiseman. I had yet to use my medium format camera. I used a 35mm camera loaded with very fine grain and contrasty Kodak Technical Pan Film.

The photograph that art director Rick Staehling chose was the one you see here. He picked two but decided on the sad one.Of late I have gone back to my files to look at it and I am overcome by a feeling of hopelessness and sadness. Did she pose with that intention? I will never know.

On the other hand, I has a session with Les Wiseman in 1989 and there were many smiling photographs. But to go along with Siouxie’s portrait I picked the scariest.

To this day my knowledge of rock is very good thanks to my mentor Les Wiseman who said all the right things just like Reed’s Caroline.

Rosa 'Louise Odier' & Hosta 'Whirlwind' 20 July 2024

 

It seems that since I cannot lay to rest my memories of Rosemary that I am then compelled to write about them.

I believe that one of the reasons our marriage went well had all to do with Rosemary’s concept that husband and wife had to have a common interest that went beyond jobs and children. In 1986 I was informed that we were going to buy a large house in a corner garden in Kerrisdale. She said she wanted a house with a garden. My interest in gardening was negligible.

When we moved, we were faced with a shady garden that had many trees. I did some research and I kept reading about hostas.

Houses were being torn down in our neighbourhood to make way for big houses with four-car garages. Rosemary was keen in salvaging(she liked to use the word liberate) plants from the gardens when the houses were going to be torn down. One day we went to a nearby house with our wheelbarrow and spades. She pointed at a large dark green plant and said, “Alex, that’s a hosta”.

She knew that in those years hostas were entry level for male engineers and doctors. Perhaps she thought for male photographers? She was right. She turned me into an avid gardener and years later I even had a monthly garden column for Western Living.

It was our garden that gave us that extra interest in life. Around 1991 she told me that we were going to a meeting of the Vancouver Rose Society. Until the day she died while she understood my liking of hostas and tolerated them, she became happy when I, too went crazy over roses.

Today, Saturday,  July 20 I keep thinking of two words as I drive around Vancouver (today I had ice-cream and lunch with Hilary, my youngest daughter in a place I frequented with Rosemary when we went to buy plants at a nursery called Mandeville). Those words are with/without. I think I did this with Rosemary. I am now doing this with Hilary but without Rosemary.

I wanted to somehow, in one scan, to bring the idea of our love for roses (and her tolerance for my hostas). I found this photograph in my files, a self-portrait of us in Arboledas, Mexico taken around 1973. I must note that Rosemary seems to have some severely plucked eyebrows and I have long hair.

When I took that photograph I had no idea of thinking ahead (who does?) that someday I would be writing this without Rosemary.