Friday, March 02, 2007



A bad cold can devastate an old guy like me. As I walked down the stairs this morning nothing was working and the knees just about buckled. It made me remember Vancouver dancer Cori Caulfield who can walk, move, dance with such ease as if she had Teflon in her joints. And so I have the opportunity to put up this photo of her which is one of my favourite pictures ever of a dancer.

Cori's back, a lovely back is all that the one that I saw so many years ago, wasn't. I was with my father and we were taking the subte back from a movie on Lavalle Street in downtown Buenos Aires. We were on our way to Retiro station and the train to Coghlan. It was near carnival and I spotted the bare back of a woman on the end of the other subway car. There was a lot of singing and chanting. It was one of those murgas or carnival street bands that sing the samba in the streets of Buenos Aires during carnival. I was repelled by the woman's muscular and ugly back. I was only 8 or 9 and I did not understand at the time that she was probably a man dressed as a woman.

In some way when I photographed Cori with her apple I exorcised that terrible image from so long ago.

Cori Caulfield on space