Thursday, December 03, 2009



Yesterday I taught my last studio classes for the season at Focal Point. The Contemporary Nude Portrait and Portraiture Through the Ages will meet one more time next Wednesday when we will critique the pictures my students took in the last two weeks. I will miss this bunch as both classes had very good photographers who showed that rare talent that is initiative.



I had an ambivalent problem. I knew that we were going to have two of the best models at Focal Point and both of them would be in both classes. They are Quilla and Yuliya. I have been feeling a bit down and out i wthout my studio and watching my students shoot great models while I supervise. It would take up too much time and it would seem to me a bit unprofessional for me to also hook up to the studio lights and take my own pictures during class time. In the past I have occasionally shot with a small film camera with fast film and taken a few of what we in the business of photography call grab shots. I was ambivalent because I really wanted to take some pictures.



Gerrit te Hennepe, the lawyer of my of my recently deceased friend, Abraham Rogatnick, called me at noon and provided me (I did not know at the time of the call) for a justification to shoot some pictures of Quilla and Yuliya. He called me to tell me he had found a couple of cameras in Abraham’s house and he wanted me to have them as I might find some use for them. I tried to explain to him that film cameras are now obsolete and mostly worthless and that I wanted to get rid of stuff and not acquire more of it.



Te Hennepe insisted. I passed by his office which was conveniently a block away from Focal Point. He gave me a box with two cameras. One of them was a Malaysian made, electronic, film Minolta that did not bark because its battery was dead. The other camera was a rare gem that few people would know about.



It was a 1965 vintage Canon Pellix that had the innovation of a partly transparent mirror so that the usual noisy and jarring vibration flip of the mirror up (during the exposure) and then down (after the exposure) was eliminated as the mirror was fixed. Part of the light was diverted to the film and some of the rest to the viewfinder (not all that bright!). The camera failed in spite of this innovation. It was an expensive camera. The elegant mirror that did not move must have appealed to Abraham who had a Bauhaus feel for things as one of his teachers at Harvard was Walter Gropius. The Pellix came with two lenses for which Abraham must have paid a little fortune. One of them was a superb 50mm F-1.4 and the other a startlingly thin profiled “pancake” lens, a 38mm F-2.8. Years ago I had taken some clandestine shots in the Mexican Museum of anthropology (photography was and I believe still prohibited) by hiding a little Pentax MX with a pancake lens inside my jacket.



I taught the 2 to 5 nude class and controlled my urge to take pictures. During my break between 5 and 7 I went to the Tea Room across the street on 10th Avenue from Focal Point. Abraham and I used to sit there for at least an hour, sipping African tea and eating the fine pastry made by the Taiwanese/ Brazilian owner. I have been going there and missing Abraham a lot, particularly his intelligent discourse.

I made up my mind that I was going to test the Pellix on Yuliya and Quilla. I practiced putting a roll of Tri-X a few times into the camera until I thought I had down pat the loading mechanism. I snapped the shutter a few times, removed the film and put it back and advanced it to my first exposure for the next class.



There is a cardinal rule of photography that stipulates that one should never use a camera for something important if the camera has not been used before. So, just to be sure I also loaded a marginally newer Nikon FM-2 with a roll of Tri-X.

I managed to shoot about 6 pictures with the Pellix. Focusing in a dark studio with the dim viewfinder was a challenge but I enjoyed the assertive but still quiet shutter. I took most of the pictures with the Nikon. I processed the film this morning. I had a pleasant surprise that was caused by some serendipity of which if I were to believe in things paranormal I would say that Abraham had a hand in it from the beyond.



Somehow when I snapped the shutter in the tea shop I caught my tea glass, the saucer and the spoon. When I photographed Quilla with it, that image of was on her frame and I had a double exposure. The combination of Quilla and the tea glass was delightful.

There were two more pictures in that Canon Pellix Roll that were killers. One is an almost profile of Yuliya and the other is the nicely scary picture of Quilla that I scanned. For drama I added a red and yellow toning via Photoshop. The rest of the pictures are the more predictable ones taken with my Nikon FM-2. I believe that I just might show off to my student’s in next week’s critique!



Abraham would have told me, “You should take pictures when you can even if you are the teacher. If you don’t, you're a schmuck.” Thanks to Abraham and his sophisticated klunker I feel as if I were a 20 year-old, all excited about photography as I feast my eyes on the pictures of Quilla and Yuliya.



I sent the Quilla and the tea picture to Gerrit who replied:

Dear Alex

Thanks for sending me to first two exposures of your use of the Pellix.............Abraham would have undoubtedly have appreciated the unintended yet creative juxtaposition of the two images.

It is a wonderful picture - the model is beautiful and expressive - and will remind me of you and Abraham........and makes me pleased that you have the camera(s)

Were you working on chiaroscuro?

Gerrit

Technical Information: All pictures were taken either by a Nikon FM-2 with a 50mm F-1.4 or a Canon Pellix with a 50mm F-1.4. I shot Kodak Tri-X pushed to 800 ISO which I processed in Kodak HC-110 Dil 1/39 for 6 minutes 45 seconds.

Wednesday, December 02, 2009




This is a pleasant story that begins with a very serious Argentine woman. Nilda Crivelli came to Vancouver this past June as a delegate to the Vancouver World Rose Convention. She was a former president of the Argentine Rose Society. She was formal as many Argentines can sometimes be. I invited her to our rose garden and then we visited Vancouver rosarian Janet Wood with my granddaughter Rebecca. By the end of the day we were caught on one of those bicycle Fridays and we did not move, from our Cardero and Georgia spot for a whole hour. By then Crivelli had lost her Argentine formality and she was laughing as I secretely swore at the cyclists who blocked our way.

A few months later she e-mailed me to tell me she had suggested that Martín Flores (a director and playwright of the avant garde in Buenos Aires) look me up when he arrived on an interesting assignment in Vancouver. Flores did contact me and I had him for dinner. It was a treat to be able to converse (over a delicious bottle of Argentine Torrontés wine)in Argentine Spanish with the younger Argentine man. I suggested we meet for a night of theatre at UBC’s Telus Theatre. My friend writer and actor C. C. Humphreys was tackling the principal protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s The Master Builder. The play was a tad heavy and serious for us but I told Martín that in Vancouver we had a tradition of being able to go back stage to talk to the actors. That cheered us up. We went backstage and caught C.C. Humphreys in the shower. He did allow us to appear with him in his almost near naked Ibsen persona and told me, “I gather this will appear in some blog of yours.”

For me the evening was one that I have been digesting since. I had somehow had never seen an Ibsen play. It was a strange experience. My first impression was that Ibsen did not translate too well into the 21st century. Now I am not so sure and I think, that thanks to C.C. Humphreys I am ready for Hedda Gabler.

Martín Flores explained to me that by some quirk of fate he had been invited to Vancouver to direct the students of the Eric Hamber Secondary School Theatre Department (Theatre Hamber).

I decided to take Rebecca to the opening night, yesterday Tuesday and alas I got my time wrong and we arrived at the intermission. This mistake ended up being a blessing in disguise as I will explain below.

Naked, written by the 12 students in the play, and only directed by Martín Flores (As he modestly explained his contribution in what if you happen to know Argentines is most uncharacteristic!) is a terrific set of 12 monologues (with some limited interaction of the other players). The actors reveal up front on a mike some of their pet fears: The One In Love, The One Who Cannot Dancer, The One Who Can’t Stand to be Touched, The One Who Fears Being Buried Alive (extremely Edgar Allan Poeish).

In my years of going to terrible high school plays (so as not to offend my daughters) Naked was professional, terrific and best of all my laughs and Rebecca’s were good chicken soup to my lately bluish insides.

The man singly responsible for the laughs was John Lee (The One who is Afraid of Many Things), see below in picture with Rebecca and Martin Flores. He has all the makings of natural born stand-up comedian who will make a fortune if his plans to become a nuclear physicist should fail. Lee the man who fears pants that fit and gave us an explanation of why the Chinese might not be able to drive (in involves unicorns and giraffes) delighted us and made Rebecca and I decide that we should return to see the play (all of it!) tomorrow. We will bring along her mother. I look forward to all that laughing.

But it wasn’t all laughs. Sarah Trolland (The One in Love) gave a crescendo of a performance where she updated with panache (my view on it) Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s How Do I Love Thee? By the end of her monologue I could see tears in her eyes.

As I understand it, her friend Justin Somjen (a precocious student of mine at Focal Point) shed some tears the very same night we were there. We plan to do some more laughing tomorrow.



Naked, until December 4th, 7pm (doors open at 6:30) Admission $6.00 Directed by Martín Flores Cárdenas with:

Zahra Cully, Alex Dee, (I thought he was cute and when I asked Rebecca she blushed.), Andrew Duffy, Pamela Kennedy, Krystyna Kozlowski, Jon Lee, Ellen MacNevin, Mihajlo Todorovic, Sarah Trolland, Stephen Wong, Holly Zhou.

Tuesday, December 01, 2009


At the last possible moment on Monday I found out I had to teach for 6 hours on Tuesday. That put my blog writing on the back burner until last night (Tuesday) when I managed to find a subject to write about and did so in short minutes. I went to bed with pangs of regret for having thrown away the negatives of La Señorita.

This morning I woke up to a pleasant and interesting e-mail communication from Parksville, BC professional photographer Gordon Lafleur who wrote:

I find it interesting and charming that the gaze of the lovely Mexican woman on today's entry is the same gaze that appears in most of your grandaughters’ photos.

It would seem that Lafleur caught a quirk of mine that I was too close to notice. The pattern was set back then. It was in that unintended class that I taught yesterday at Van Arts (a brand new set of students who all seem to be passionate for photography) that I told my students that for years I have been taking pictures of Rebecca and everybody else, gazing at my camera seriously. I told them that I had borrowed, adapted and made my own the same serious gaze capture that Julia Margaret Cameron so eloquently used in her portraiture. The portraits of Alice Liddell (taken by Cameron when Liddell was an adult) when she seriously posed as a little girl quasi adult for the Reverend Charles Lutwidge Dodgson influenced my approach as did the half century stretch of portraiture by German photographer August Sander.



There was a fundamental reason for the seriousness of early photographic portraiture. To begin with in the painting of portraits few (except for La Joconde) would sit and smile for the length of time needed to render the painting. Serious portraits were the norm. With the advent of photographic portraiture, photographers were plagued with slow lenses and even slower silver sensitized materials. At first the best subjects for these photographers were dead people. Only corpses could remain at rest and not move during those lengthy many minute exposures. As exposures began to shorten devices were still needed to keep portrait subjects at rest. Metal bars attached to their backs and even neck braces were used. In the length of a long exposure the closing of eyes were inconsequential. As the exposures shortened the closing of eyes became a problem.



It was easier, then, for people to gaze, with no smile into the distance.

As I sifted through that little leather-bound album of portraits that I had used as a portfolio to get work in the Mexico City of 1974 I found the portrait of my Yorkshire-born friend Andrew Taylor who is the godfather of my eldest daughter Ale. As he gazed seriously into my camera he almost looks like an American Civil War general. This is not an accident. The portraits of that civil war that I saw inside an American Heritage book at the USIS Lincoln Library in Buenos Aires in the early 50s were the ones that awoke my interest in photography. Those civil war generals, as I gazed on them in that first glimpse around 1951 or 52 looked to me like men that I might have seen that same day walking on Calle Florida.



Andrew Taylor with his wild and wide psychedelic tie looks to me like an ever so slightly less-crazed General William Tecumseh Sherman about to embark on his destructive march to the sea.

In order of appearance:

1. Andrew Taylor, Esquire
2. General William Tecumseh Sherman
3. General Ulysses S. Grant
4. General John B. Hood (of the Confederate Army)

Monday, November 30, 2009


In 1974 my wife and I decided to sell our house, quit our jobs as teachers and move, with our two young daughters from Mexico City to Vancouver. It seemed like a perfect plan except that we had not counted on the problem of not having anybody buy our house. It was not a detached house and it was part of row of houses in the outskirts of Mexico City. Suddenly we had a house we could not sell and no money to pay the mortgage.

So I launched my career as a portrait photographer of the wealthy with an Asahi Pentax S-3, a 55mm (Auto-Takumar F-2) lens, a 28mm lens and an 85. I had a home darkroom and I mounted the photographs I took onto cardboard using mounting tissue and an iron. It was fashionable at the time to mount pictures on thick wood and paint edges black. I had no money for lights so I used Kodak Tri-X. My use of an oval brass frame to give my pictures and old look (accentuated with toning my pictures in smelly Kodak Sepia Toner) gave me lots of clients word of mouth from one to the next. I was doing so well that my neighbours suggested I give Mexico another chance. We did not. We finally sold the house and moved to Vancouver. Through the years when I try to compact my files (to borrow computerese language) I throw my negatives away. It was perhaps 10 years ago that I decided that all those Mexicans I had photographed in the posh districts of el Pedregal de San Angel and Las Lomas de Chapultepec had to go. I had some pangs of guilt but I threw the away anyway. I kept the little leather-bound portfolio I used to secure work and I have always been charmed by this señorita with the beautiful chest and the enigmatic face. I remember nothing about her, not even the circumstances that led me to photograph her, so well dressed, leaning against a sofa of a living room.

You can see the ravages of time on my print. Stains (sometimes called fixer staing) are appearing on the picture. I do hope that the pictures la señorita purchased are in better shape and that she is a happy woman who has learned to smile.

Sunday, November 29, 2009



Informe Sobre Ciegos

¡Oh, dioses de la noche!
¡Oh, dioses de las tinieblas, del incesto y del crimen,
de la melancolía y del suicidio!
¡Oh, dioses de las ratas y de las cavernas,
de los murciélagos, de las cucarachas!
¡Oh, violentos, inescrutables dioses
del sueño y de la muerte!

¿Cuándo empezó esto que ahora va a terminar con mi asesinato?

Informe Sobre Ciegos, Sobre Héroes y Tumbas
Ernesto Sábato, 1961

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Argentina is lucky in having more than one definitive Argentine novel. My favourite is Ernesto Sábato's Sobre Héroes y Tumbas , 1961 (On Heroes and Tombs, 1961) which I read in 1964. It left me shattered with its beauty and melancholy. By 1964 the section Informe Sobre Ciegos (Report on the Blind) was famous in all Argentina. This chapter of the novel almost stands alone because of its independence and starkness. It has something to do with a secret society that involves the blind beggars who sell stuff (in my day little ballenitas or plastic stiffeners for dress shirt collars) in Buenos Aires subways and trains. It is staged in a fantastic underworld that coexists with the "real and normal" world.


It was in 1965 when I first heard Astor Piazzolla live at the Teatro Florida and fell in love with Susy. I then bought every record of Piazzolla's that I could get my hands on. My favourite has always been Tango Contemporáneo - Astor Piazzolla y Su Nuevo Octeto. It was in this recording that I heard Ernesto Sábato himself read that first incredible paragraph from El Informe de los Ciegos. His voice is strangely pitched and eerily monotone. I replaced the virtually unplayable record with a CD just a few years ago. Even today is sounds avant-garde and fresh.

Report on the Blind

Oh gods of the night!
Oh gods of darkness, incest and crime
of melancholy and suicide!
Oh gods of of rats and caverns,
of bats and cockroaches!
Oh violent and inscrutable gods
of dreams and death!

When did this begin which will end with my assassination?
Introduction to Report on the Blind from Sobre Héroes y Tumbas, Ernesto Sábato (my translation)


You can listen to Ernesto Sábato read that if you wait (be patient!) until the end of this striking composition by Astor Piazzolla here.





Why is Rebecca's photograph here? The moody look of the picture with all the skulls and the candles simply brought to mind this book and also of one of the last books that Sábato may have written (he is alive and 98) Antes Del Fin (Before the End) which is an extremely depressing, but wonderful work of essays on death and the author's reminiscences on his life. The melancholy of the rainy and dark afternoon as I took Rebecca's picture also reminded me of late wintery afternoons in Buenos Aires with my friend Felipe Occhiuzzi. We would sit down on a bench at Parque Lezama and try to imagine two men, one with glasses the other a blind man with a cane, walking, slowly, arm in arm, chatting about novels and writing. The one with the glasses would have been Sábato and the blind man with the cane, Borges.

Saturday, November 28, 2009


Today Lauren went to a Brownies camp out in Abbotsford so we only had Rebecca to spend the day with us. We had a Jewish lunch. I prepared coleslaw and made some pastrami sandwiches on rye with strong honey mustard. I served it with some pickles and we drank Doctor Pepper which is one of Rebecca’s faves.

I am trying to keep my shutter button finger from atrophying by taking pictures when I can. Rebecca is a great model but not always a willing one. She was reluctant but she posed for me in the end. She might have been attracted to my little candle altar in the dining room. I told her she was La Santa Muerte the patron saint of the Mexican drug mafia.

At age 12 Rebecca has some opinions on religion which are probably based on little knowledge and mostly hearsay at that. Of all the Polaroids (the Fuji version) I took (we used film after) she liked the one with my grandmother’s Mass veil over her head. “I look like a nun,” she told me. But then she gave me a mouthful. “I don’t see how anybody can worship death.” I tried to explain how Mexicans are more willing to accept its inevitability. But this was to no avail. "I don’t understand this Virgin Mary thing. I simply don’t believe in God," and that ended my hope of reasoning with her.

I am in an uncomfortably strange position of being an almost atheist who believes that atheism (for those who will come to believe in it) must come to it slowly. How can one be a 12-year-old atheist?

Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, goblins, the Three Wise Kings are childhood beliefs that I think are important. Children must have a fantastic and an imaginary life to protect them and to serve them when in later life the reality of our existence becomes only too obvious. I think that parents who would stop children from having such fantasies would be in error.

I went through my own rite of passage and I made my first communion. I believed in something and that belief at the very least has made me appreciate sacred music, sacred art, the soaring Gothic cathedrals and trying to figure out the Holy Trinity and transubstantiation has been, in itself a rite of passage for me and for many including St. Augustine.

The story as St. Augustine told it began with him at the beach trying to understand how three distinct persons (God the Father, God the Son and the Holy Ghost) could all have one nature (God) while being three distinct persons. He spotted a little boy who was scooping water from the sea with a shell and emptying it into a hole in the sand. The little boy kept doing this and this made Augustine curious. “Little boy what are you doing?” “Sir, I am emptying the sea into the hole.” “Why that’s impossible!” “Sir it is far easier than to try to understand what you are trying to understand.” And the little boy then suddenly vanished.

Special effects in modern films have eliminated the question mark on most impossibility. We now live in a purely logical world where we make friends with people we will never meet and essences have been blurred. A telephone is now a book. It is a book that can help me find the closest Pizza Hut and tell me where I’m at in perfect latitude and longitude.

That the Virgin Mary went up to heaven in body and soul (and if you don’t believe this and you are a Catholic you are in heresy, believe it or not!) is a mystery that is illogical and because of it is beautiful and necessary if only until you might not believe it anymore. That Isaac almost sacrificed his son in his blind obedience to God also has something to instruct us that is illogical in its logic.

Rebecca told me that at age 8 or 9 she began to have her doubts about that fat man being able to deliver all those presents in one night. It is tragic but inevitable when a child stops being a child. But it is also important to try to understand that the willingness of those Christian martyrs to face hungry lions has some merit even if it does not fit the logic of our 21st century. If I were to tell Rebecca the story of those martyrs she would probably tell me that they were silly.


It was not all a loss today. I placed 21 sheets of blank paper on the living room floor and instructed Rebecca to start with the first where she was to write 1 to 100 (I erred here as it should have been 1 to 99), and then 100 to 200 and so on. When she finished she wrote the names of those centuries (she had figured it out by then). I then told her that if we were to continue back in time to our African ancestors the line would extend perhaps as far as Oakridge Mall. She then wrote events, deaths and births on each paper. I was pleasantly surprised that she correctly put the crusades in the right century and knew all about Henry the 8th.

St. Augustine famously had prayed to God: da mihi castitatem et continentiam, sed noli mod (Grant me chastity and continence, but not yet.) I would pray (hope) that Rebecca believe in something and not be the little atheist, at least, not yet.

Confirmation
Goya's Ghost
Transubstantiation

Friday, November 27, 2009


In my last few posts I have been a bit of a ranter and writer of stuff that is much too heavy to counter the dark and rainy days of November. Today it is sunny outside and I can see the bright gold leaves of my gingko on the lawn (they all fell in one day during a windstorm a couple of weeks ago). I could almost assert that I feel a tad uplifted. So I have found another excuse to be able to include, here, pictures of two very beautiful women. At age 67 I keep wondering if my obsession (mania?) to photograph undraped women is finally over. Is this sort of obsession an obsession that one outgrows? Have I seen it all? Or must I keep at it to satisfy what seems to be, now, a faint but unceasing little voice in my head that nags me that it is never over until it’s over?

In my years in Mexico City and Vancouver I have purchased many art books and photography books. Many are about the nude. My granddaughter Rebecca likes to sit in the living room to look at them. One of her favourites is the great big book with large photos taken of the Hollywood stars of the 30s, 40, and 50s by George Hurrell. In particular she likes his portraits of Johnny Weissmuller as Tarzan. It was the picture that made me take her by the hand, (while her interest was high) and drive to Videomatica one Saturday afternoon. We rented Tarzan The Ape Man (1932) with Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan. We had an enjoyable afternoon. Now Lauren (like her sister did some few years ago) hangs from the stair banisters like an ape. We will have to teach her the Tarzan chest stomping yell.



I will not deny that Rebecca also looks at the “other” books comfortably reclined on the psychiatric couch of our living room. She had asked me last week if I had used any of the pictures in the nude books as inspiration. I answered, “Yes,” and then she made a startling statement, “Papi your pictures, the ones in your hard drive, are a lot tamer than the ones in the books.

I feel that Rebecca has seen enough paintings and photographs in museums and books to make up her mind what she likes and what she doesn’t. At age 12 I did not have the library that she has now at her disposal or the image banks of the internet. I think that Rebecca has intelligence and good taste to look for what is good.

All the above makes me think of a book, The Naked and the Veiled - The Photographic Nudes of Erwin Blumenfeld (note his picture below) (1999 Thames & Hudson Ltd, London) which has a most interesting introduction by his son, Yorick Blumenfeld was, 1999, a correspondent and features editor for Newsweek.



Yorick Blumfeld’s introduction is the best and most persuasive apology I have ever read about the merits and benefits of the study and exectution of nudes in painting, sculpture and photography.


In particular he cites his father as a little boy and his relationship with his nanny Tittymouse. There is an illustration, a reproduction of Hans Memling’s Eve, From Adam and Eve, 1479 that reads:

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Memling’s classic ‘gothic’ elongations appealed to Blumenfeld’s sense of the erotic. He [1897-1969] was introduced to Cranach, Memling and the Flemish school of painters when he first visited the Berlin museums with his nanny around 1906.

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It seems that I may be my Rebecca’s art nanny so I don’t feel at all uncomfortable at the fact that she pours over my art books. Of Blumenfeld’s nanny this is what Yorick Blumenfeld writes:

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Before he ventured out into the world he took his heterosexual apprentiship in the nursery. His beloved nanny, ‘Tittymouse’ was the daughter of a talcum-powder manufacturer. ‘And she smelt of it,’ Blumenfeld wrote. ‘She had tiny pock-marks which I tried to kiss away. In return she taught me the butterfly kiss…’ Secretly in an era when it was considered risqué for a ‘lady’ to show her ankles, he already longed to see naked women.

He claimed that that his enduring obsession with transparency and veils was born, when at the age of nine, he was taken by his governess to visit the studio of a Berlin painter. The model, surprised by their entrance, quickly threw a diaphanous cloth over herself. But the outline of her body was still visible against the light. Later in his teenage years, the thin suggestive veils employed by such admired painters as Memling, Cranach and Botticelli made Blumenfeld realize that naked women could become ‘even more naked by their transparent veils.

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And more to the point of what you cannot see in my photographs here (breasts) Yorick Blumenfeld quotes his father:

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In all the widely ranging variations on the theme of the nude shown in this book, the youthful female breast plays a dominant role. I don’t think my father had anything like a breast fixation, but breasts were obviously a source of titillation deeply rooted in his psyche. The breast was something of a personal shrine to him and he eroticizes its form by focusing on the nipple. He always depicted the breast with great delicacy and something akin to reverence, striving to capture the elusiveness of perfect symmetry while trying to define photographically the ideal of the beautiful form. His photographs of breasts (unlike some of his collages and drawings) are never ironic, pornographic or even jokey. They are pure evocations of joy and celebrations of the feminine.



‘It cannot have been the influence of my nurse’s breasts alone which led to the development of this development of this addiction to golden sections. (“Our first perceptions of the distance between the nipples determines our sense of proportion for life”) he wrote in Eye to I. The highly evocative and and often voluptuous female forms shown here may therefore be interpreted in part as an effort to improve the gender. And there is no doubt that many are erotically linked to his early recollections, and to his dreams, as well as to the classical education he received in the Berlin ‘Gymnasium’in the golden era before the First World War.




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The two women in today’s blog were as beautiful as I ever saw. Anna, left, was curvaceous and her breasts would have instantly attracted Blumenfeld’s interest and camera. The other woman, Mae-Britt was the only person I ever met who was born in Greenland. Her father was Inuit and her mother was Danish. The combination of her voluptuousness and the blue-green-gray shade of her eyes, which resembled the colour of the Antarctic ice I had seen so many years ago drifting by in Ushuaia, could melt me one moment and freeze me the next.