Saturday, April 30, 2011



Daniel Arnold


Rebecca and I were shoehorned into a tiny hotel room at the Waldorf on East Hastings with 16 other people. We were sitting on folding chairs against a wall. In front of us was a nondescript hotel room wall, a double bed, a nondescript table lamp and a TV set showing bra ads. A youngish man entered the room wearing long boxer shorts and after perusing a Playboy Magazine he did some tough pushups on the floor. There was a knock on the door and a gentle looking bearded man entered.


This was the beginning of a claustrophobic, intense play, Tape (written by Stephen Belber) and directed by Amiel Gladstone that felt so real that I was soon not even a fly on the wall but part of the action. Perhaps the theme of the play, an amateur firefighter turned professional drug dealer (Daniel Arnold) who meets up with his former high school friend ( played by Matthew Kowalchuk, as a budding avante-garde filmmaker with principles), ten years after who have issues to resolve, may have been a bit too much for my Rebecca. But I don’t think so. After that hour of verbal mayhem, I know that she will some day soon attend some local and very professionally staged musical play and find it wanting. I am glad of that.

The evening began when a cool and quietly beautiful woman with hair down took us (all 18 of us) up to room 102 and sat us down.

The cool and quietly beautiful woman, (Marisa Smith) then appeared, as the third protagonist, somewhere half way during the play with her hair up and dressed like the assistant Crown Council attorney she is supposed to represent. She (Amy) is the unresolved issue between Vince (Daniel Arnold) and Jon (Matthew Kowalchuk). The straight-laced woman revealed  to Rebecca's and my  shock,  a kink in her smart lawyer's outfit, a fondness for a man’s hand about her mouth.

Tape is the kind of play that serves as a constant reminder for me on how far theatre has come in Vancouver. Back in 1975 a theatre experience in Vancouver was no better than what you would get at a terrible high school play. Tape felt immediate, extremely professional, but paradoxically so well acted that I forgot the actors were acting.

Watching the gentle (was he really gentle?) Matthew Kowalchuk, watching the potentially dangerous Daniel Arnold (was he really dangerous?) and watching the graceful but suddenly cold and calculating Marisa Smith (all that) plunged me into any of the stories that I have recently read by Joyce Carol Oates. The only difference is that Oates' gentle Adirondacks, her usual setting had simply been transfered to a semi seedy hotel in Vancouver's East End. The unresolved ambivalence at the end of the play was pure Joyce Carol Oates.

The experience of taking my Rebecca (13) to see this play and after I had introduced her to Max Reimer (the Playhouse Artistic Director who was part of the audience) will be an experience that she will never forget. And yet Rebecca might be right and I might be wrong. I asked her, “What do you think of this? Is this an experience that will never be topped?” Her answer was, “I am not sure. I am young and I have a whole life in front of me.” I silently agreed and felt a melancholy that I might not be around to share it with her.

Tape, an Alley Theatre production in conjunction with the Waldorf  Hotel was supposed to run until tomorrow Sunday but it is being extended. For reservations call  604 -671-9776.



YouTube promo, quite wonderful!

Friday, April 29, 2011

Jacket Painting - La Mémoire by René Magritte

I remember him (I scarcely have the right to use this ghostly verb; only one man on earth deserved the right, and he is dead), I remember him with a dark passionflower in his hand, looking at it as no one has ever looked at such a flower, though they might look from the twilight of day until the twilight of night, for a whole life long. I remember him, his face immobile and Indian-like, and singularly remote, behind his cigarette. I remember (I believe) the strong delicate fingers of the plainsman who can braid leather. I remember, near those hands, a vessel in which to make mate, bearing the arms of the Banda Oriental [Uruguay] I remember, in the window of the house, a yellow rush mat, and beyond, a vague marshy landscape. I remember clearly his voice, the deliberate, resentful nasal voice of the old Eastern Shore man, without the Italianate syllables of today. I did not see him more than three times; the last time, in 1887.

Funes el memorioso, Jorge Luís Borges, translated by Anthony Kerrigan


My grandmother Lolita (Dolores) Reyes de Irureta Goyena died in the late 60s and I am almost sure she did not know who she was.

In 1967 she returned from Cairo where she had been visiting her son Tony to my mother’s home in Veracruz. When she came back she did not know who any of us where. It was disconcerting to look at her and to be answered with a blank expression. Often when my cat Plata stares at me with her intelligent eyes I wonder what she sees and senses. I know that the moment I open my eyes in the morning, even if I don’t move she will know I am awake and will then stand on my shoulder to force me to get up and feed her. I wonder sometimes if her perception is greater than of my grandmother’s when she returned from Egypt.

Years before, in Mexico City, when she had been having problems remembering things she had joked about it. She had dispatched me to a neighbourhood Botica Homeopática to buy pills of  “ácido glutámico” which had the reputation in helping avoid memory loss.

My grandmother, in the beginning, never had any of the more troubling and aggressive tendencies that we now identify with Alzheimer’s disease. But little by little she would take her bath and get ready for bed earlier and earlier during the day. When it was noon and she was ready for bed my mother decided that she had to be put in a home that was run by nuns in Cuernavaca. After a year we received a call that my grandmother was getting violent so we had to put her in an institution, in which she did not last long. We buried her in a nearby cemetery and I would be accurate in saying that nobody is alive who might know where she is buried. I have long forgotten.

To have a good memory sounds unromantic and unpoetic. There is a word, not used anymore that fits the bill for romantic and poetic. The word is memorious. It just happens that the word is common currency (well almost!) in Spanish. The word is memorioso. It is a beautiful sounding word. A woman with a good memory would be memoriosa.

The most famous use of the word is in Jorge Luís Borges’ story Funes el memorioso published originally in 1942. The man, Irineo Funes, has such a prodigious memory that, Borges wrote:


Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.

What Borges is saying above is that Funes, the man with the amazing memory was so much into the details that he could not see the forest for the leaves.



In a pile of envelopes not far from where I write is a white one that has in my almost illegible handwriting Young girl + horse. I believe the negatives and pictures may be 12 or more years old. I know I took them in Southlands. But I do not have the faintest idea for what magazine or why I photographed this lovely but unknown (to me) young girl. I could pursue remembering by noting that on her T-shirt it says Maynard’s Pony Meadows. It must be the very place where I photographed her. I could go to the establishment, if it still exists and enquire. But at the same time I have a strange feeling of wonder in not knowing who she is. It means that unlike Funes I am able to imagine without having the details to worry about.

Which brings me to:

Amnesia is a desert of fine white sun-glaring sand to the horizon. Amnesia isn’t oblivion. Amnesia isn’t memory loss caused by brain injury or neurological deterioration, in which actual brain cells have died. Amnesia is almost-remembering. Amnesia is the torment of almost-remembering. Amnesia is the dream from which you have only just awakened, hovering out of reach below the surface of bright rippling water. Amnesia is the paralyzed limb into which one day, one hour, feeling may begin to flow.

Smother, by Joyce Carol Oates from her book Give Me Your Heart – Tales of Mystery and Suspense. An Otto Penzler Book, 2010.

Thursday, April 28, 2011

Vancouver Magazine Jan/Feb 2011

Generally when I teach  my class at Focal Point, after a studio session, (when my students shoot  under my supervision) there is a critique in the next class. Students bring the pictures they took in the all-day studio session and we project them so that we can discuss, gently, what is good and what can be improved. This year I just finished a course called Editorial Photography. The final critique was a couple of weeks ago and suddenly, by some strange planning oversight, I am to give my class one more peek into the world of magazines today. How does one teach such a class when magazines and newspapers (that used to pay good bucks for the content and did so to me!) are in decline and the mantra of our age is that the best price is free?

The first picture here is a Polaroid self portrait that was used by the kind folks at Vancouver Magazine who hired a writer, the best in the business, Charles Campbell, to write about me before I fade, not like an old soldier, but like an old poorly fixed photograph. The article had nine pages of pictures! It was on the newstand from late December until the end of February. I was truly surprised to have received exactly one phone call in all that time. I had not even expected one. I do believe that the importance of magazines has shifted to the web. In the second picture is my photograph of sprinter Ben Johnson. Time paid me a ton of money for that. It would be difficult for me to imagine getting that kind of money now. I have a sobering respect for anybody who wants to be a photographer in today's climate. 

For a while I would tell my students that if they wanted to be photographers they might want to have a plan B, such as the much more lucrative profession of plumbing. But if I were loud and clear on this these institutions of the photographic arts would not be clamoring to give me a voice in class.

I found a handle, a very positive one, that follows the history of photography from its inception around 1826 and how this brilliant and accurate new “thing” was limited to appearing on salon walls or individually inserted in books as Henry Fox Talbot did with his photogenic drawings published in six installments as the Pencil of Nature. This book happens to be the world’s first (and still one of the most expensive) illustrated “coffee table” book. These pictures could not have been printed directly into books as nobody had invented a system for doing so. American Civil War photographers had to see their pictures converted to wood cuts before they could appear in newspapers or in such journals as Harper’s Weekly.

But around 1877 a newspaper in New York City published a photograph of the Steinway (about the arts!) Building using a new technique called halftone reproduction. From then on the photograph was king and it could appear on anything and it could even be sent by wire across the world (long before the sending of digital files through the internet).

My first & last Time Cover, Oct. 1988

The history of the halftone process is the history of the ascendency of the art, the craft and the technique of photography. Magazines, newspapers, book publishers and ad agencies had lots of money to shower on photographers. It all climaxed with Life Magazine and even of late with such magazines as Vanity Fair and the The Sunday Magazine of the New York Times.


I tell my students in as positive a manner as I can (and I never mention the plumbing angle) that photography is now in a transition between the halftone and whatever will emerge in our digital age. What the world will do for them and what they can do for that world is for the world and my students to decide. I can only now, at my age, just watch.

I felt that a blog that I published (even now that sounds hollow to me when considered in the context of placing something on the web) back in December 2009 might be appropriate for my students to consider in their last class today.

It is a brave new world, but an uncertain one, they stand to inherit.



A Penguin In The Arctic
Friday, December 04, 2009




In the early 50s Bert Stern, 17, was working in the mailroom of Look Magazine. Delivering letters to the art director of the magazine’s promotion department he looked at a layout and blurted, “There’s a better way to do that.”

“Okay,” the amused art director told the upstart boy with no college, no designing training, “so do it.” Stern had found a teacher. The man’s name was Hershel Bramson. He hauled Stern up from his mailroom work to work as his assistant. Often the two would shut Bramson’s door to talk over a Coke and a handful of Oreo cookies; listening, cutting and pasting, Stern absorbed the elements of design that he now brings to every picture. “If you are going to put something on a very nice piece of clean paper,” Bramson used to tell him, “improve it. Don’t schlock it up.”

In 1955 under contract with Smirnoff Vodka Stern took an idea to the ad agency L.C. Gumbiner on how to convey the driest of martinis.

“What!”the president exclaimed. “Egypt? We don’t want to pay for your vacation.”
“Believe me, “Stern said, “in the middle of summer, Egypt is no vacation.”
“Why don’t you just build a pyramid here in a studio?”
“I don’t know how,” Stern said. “Besides, people will remember the ad if they hear I went all the way to Egypt for it. On top of that, they have an instinct that tells them when something is fake. We all know that pyramid.”

Petersen’s Masters of Contemporary Photography
Bert Stern: How To Turn Ideas Into Images



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Since the late 70s when I first purchased the above book about Bert Stern, I have been inspired by all of Stern’s principles for conceptualizing ideas in his head that lead to memorable images.

But I also worry about Stern’s belief in people having an instinct for what is real and for what is fake. Stern’s shot of the ultimate dry martini had the impact that could only happen in a "pre-special effects/Photoshop" era. Now just about anybody can seamlessly place a penguin in the arctic and a polar bear in the Antarctic. Nothing is seen as impossible anymore.

While I never went to Egypt or spent 2 weeks and 140 degree heat on the desert sand I have my own photograph that today would certainly not be conceived and achieved in the same way.







It was sometime in the late 80s that Vancouver Magazine editor Malcolm Parry told me (it was a precise and startling mouthful), “Alex I want you to photograph a Porsche Carrera 4 and a Nissan 300ZX together and moving. I want you to use that Norman flash of yours. I want the cars to be red and I want you to be in one of the cars. I will drive the other.”

I thought Parry was crazy. Why the flash? Was there any purpose in it except to make my task that much more difficult? The startling glow of the resulting picture says something about Parry's talent for pre-visualization.

The first thing I did was to inspect both cars. It was our luck that the dealers had a red Porsche and a red Nissan. The 300ZX’s front end was all plastic. But the Porsche’s had a metal hook for towing it. I could design some sort of clamp that would hold a motorized Nikon FM-2 and Norman 200B light head and battery pack. I needed an extension to make the motor drive cord from the Nikon extend all the way to the interior of the car where I would be riding shotgun. I told Mac that the only way I could get the shot was to buy an expensive  Nikon fisheye lens. I purchased a used one and Vancouver Magazine footed the bill.

For close to an hour we went up and down Georgia and the Cambie Street Bridge. We had problems with drivers that would position their cars so as to block my shooting angle. Sometime in the end of the day we had one of those dramatic skies and I got my shot.

Both the shots you see here have no manipulation except the manipulation of neurons in the mind. What will replace that, now that we can put penguins in the arctic and polar bears in the Antarctic?

Wednesday, April 27, 2011


First I have to explain this thing that exists between Argentines and Brazilians. We Argentines think we are superior to Brazilians. Brazilians do not agree so there has been a rivalry of sort for years since almost the beginning of both nations. In fact the founder of the Argentine Navy, Irish-born Guillermo (William) Brown not only defeated the Spanish navy but also a greater Brazilian navy, in a later war against Brazil, in the battle of Juncal in 1827. This rivalry has never quite escalated to an out and out war since, but things flair up for football matches. As things stand in 2011 it seems that Brazil has surpassed  Argentina in just about everything except, some Argentine football fans might point out, that the Argentine player for Barcelona, Lionel Messi, is playing havoc on the championship chances of bitter rival Real Madrid. Real Madrid is led by its trainer José Mourinho who even though he is Portuguese stands in for Brazil!


In 1966 I was on board a very slow Argentine merchant marine steamer on its way from Buenos Aires to Veracruz, Mexico. It stopped on just about every port in Brazil. As the only passenger I made friends with the young officers who were all about my age. We thought we were superior to all Brazilians and in particular to Brazilian men. We held to the idea Brazilian women fell for Argentine men because their own kind was a bunch of sissies (to use a kinder epithet here). Our first experience in the port of Santos did not quite set us straight.

Santos, which is the port closest to Brazilian megalopolis of Sao Paulo, is everything Rio isn’t. What that means is that Santos isn’t pretty as it is industrial. Here we disembarked with the idea of painting the town red. We avoided the infamously called red-light district called “Penicilina Estreet” and headed for the superior cafés. It was here that the four of us ran into four lovely girls who were a mixture of white and black. They were exotic and dressed to kill. We invited ourselves to their table (it is strange but it is easier to understand Spanish if you speak Portuguese and the inverse is quite the opposite) and we were soon having the four girls swoon over us. One of them offered us cigarettes from what looked like a gold cigarette case. I noticed that the cigarettes were pastel coloured (each one of a different colour) Balkan Sobranies with gold tips. After a while the girls suggested we go to a night club. By then we were wondering if we might later manage to bring the girls to the ship or find a hotel where we would bed them.



At the loud night club I could hear a Roberto Carlos (at the time an extremely popular Brazilian rocker) the song sung by nondescript musicians. The song was called Namoradinha de un Amigo Meu (I am in love with my best friend’s girl). The girls ordered Scotch. On their Argentine Merchant Marine salaries the boys ordered rum. It was at that point that I realized we had been had and that the girls were probably drinking ginger ale laced with some common alcohol and that we had been lured to unload our pesos. We made a quick retreat but still kept up with our idea of Argentine superiority.

At another port, Paranaguá (famous as a place were ships load Brazilian coffee) I went to a pharmacy to buy a comb. To my bothered surprise all the combs had the name Roberto Carlos on them. I enquired if there were any that were unmarked. I was told that I would have to travel to the provincial capital of Curitiba to find such an item. Before we shoved off I made up my mind to find out who this Roberto Carlos was and purchased a record. What you see here are partial record cover scans.

We played the record on board the ship  (the Río Aguapey) and we laughed at the over-dramatic song tiles such as I would give you the sky, They want to finish me off, I am passionate for you, You do not need to cry and so on. Besides the trademark I am in love with my best friend’s girl I was partial for Negro Gato all about a nasty black cat.

I have kept the album all these years. Roberto Carlos went on to be one of Brazil’s best known singers (who did not sing Bossa Nova!). I regret that I never did buy that Roberto Carlos comb.

The song has come back to me these days as a loved one of my family (hint she is under 20) told me a few days ago that she likes this boy who likes her best friend. “Why does this happen?” she asked me. I gently explained (and being amazed that I would have never approached my own grandmother with such a problem/question) that love was very much like two parked cars with their four way lights going. Only every once in a while would the lights of one car coincide with the lights of the other. The formula for figuring it out, perhaps as complicated as love itself, comes with the study of sine waves. I further told me that when lights do coincide we should consider ourselves lucky and take advantage.

I believe I will be playing the Roberto Carlos record in the next few days and that I will not be alone to listen to it.

Roberto Car;los- Negro Gato

Estou amando loucamente
A namoradinha de um amigo meu
Sei que estou errado
Mas nem mesmo sei como isso aconteceu
Um dia sem querer
Olhei em seu olhar
E disfarcei até pra ninguém notar

Não sei mais o que faço
Pra ninguém saber que estou gamado assim
Se os dois souberem nem mesmo sei o que eles
Vão pensar de mim

Eu sei que vou sofrer
Mas tenho que esquecer
O que é dos outros não se deve ter

Vou procurar alguém
Que não tenha ninguém
Pois comigo aconteceu gostar da namorada
De um amigo meu

Comigo aconteceu gostar da namorada
De um amigo meu

Não sei mais o que faço
Pra ninguém saber que estou gamado assim
Se os dois souberem nem mesmo sei o que eles
Vão pensar de mim

Eu sei que vou sofrer
Mas tenho que esquecer
O que é dos outros não se deve ter

Vou procurar alguém
Que não tenha ninguém
Pois comigo aconteceu gostar da namorada
De um amigo meu

Comigo aconteceu gostar da namorada
De um amigo meu

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

I was walking around the city today with a friend who is an Argentine ghost. He told me that the buses of our city were very strange. "Why I asked him?"  "Well,"  he answered, " they all seem to be going to the same place, a place called Go Canucks Go. Where is that?"



The only sport I ever excelled at was ping-pong and I was much too early in that game to experience the transition from ping-pong into its incarnation as table tennis. Ping-pong paddles became bats and I was out of the game.

In just about any other sport I have failed miserably. In basketball I was much too short and I had a habit of spraining the middle finger of my right hand. The same happened in my attempts to play volleyball. By the time I almost learned to play cricket I had moved to Mexico where baseball was a complete confusion for me. And in football (the South American kind) the moment I told anybody I was Argentine they expected me to dribble the ball like Omar Sivori or Alfredo Di Stéfano. I had the same chip on my shoulder with Argentine tango and this “sport” I managed to do efficiently (and no better) not too long ago. My attempts at playing American football (the touch football variety) ended with a sprained shoulder. The sprained shoulder came to haunt me years later when I tried to flag a cab and my shoulder went!

Since I was never good at sports I was equally nondescript at sports photography. The only time I ever got distantly close to being good was after following for a month an all female rugby team some 27 years ago.

With hockey my problem has always been an overpowering lack of interest in a sport where they tell nasty boys who have almost killed another with a stick to sit down and behave for a few minutes. Plus I absolutely hate the Hammond organ and the Mexican Hat Dance.

But in spite of my feeling of anathema for the great Canadian sport I have been assigned many times in my past as a magazine photographer to photograph the Vancouver Canucks and the Edmonton Oilers. I can even boast at having been on board a trip between Edmonton and Vancouver on the once famous Canucks Boeing 727.



Some of my better shots came courtesy of Michael Varga who as a CBC sports cameraman (he was the best until he retired last year) who gave me tips on where to position myself.

But my favourite ever hockey shots are the two you see here. I took them from the ceiling of the old Vancouver Coliseum at the PNE with a 300mm lens at 1/15 second.

All the above is the only preamble I can think of for finally being able to breathe in relief at the fact that the Vancouver Canucks finally “se sacaron la espina”. It literally means to remove a thorn from yourself. And this is what the Vancouver Canucks finally did by beating the cucos (the bogey men) of Chicago in game 7 on overtime. They justly deserved to win and I am glad they did so. Now if I could only feel a bit more of a Vancouverite after all these years here (since 1975) I just might become a fan, win or lose.

Monday, April 25, 2011



The concept of Christ rising from the dead which some would define as a form of rebirth gives many of those who celebrate Easter a valid excuse for starting afresh. That Easter almost always coincides with an early spring means that a rebirth or reawakening of perennials in the garden marks a new garden with a potential of being a better this time than last year.



For me Easter is a better day to transfer the almost always failed promise of the New Year’s resolution.


Some who might be reading this might wonder what racy pictures of an elegant woman who has the custom of smoking in bed with an Easter Monday resolve to start afresh.



The correct word that links that apparent disconnect might be justification. For years I have been in the quandary of not knowing why I keep wanting to photograph beautiful women while at the same time that I attempt to justify the taking of these pictures in cheap hotel rooms, in bed and even smoking.

Logic tells me that at age 68 I should look at these pictures (and just imagine the ones I am not able to post here because of my self-imposed rule of blogging “decency”) with the fondness of a rosy past. I should look at them and tell myself that I was an idiot as there is no justification for such a thing.

But as I look at these pictures in light of all the pornography (and badly taken photographs) of the present I find that they have a quality of restrained sexuality that suits me fine at this time of my life. They are elegant and well lit. The woman, Vantana was her name, is beautiful and lissome. What legs! What a chest! Her face is so chiseled, not quite hard, not quite soft but a nice in-between.



I look at these pictures and tell myself that even though I am an old man, if I can find subjects who will pose for me I should pursue the subject even if I have no justification. How’s that for a an Easter Monday resolution?










I took the above photographs on October 1994 in room 618 of the Marble Arch Hotel. I used a Mamiya RB-67 Pro-S with Ilford FP-4 processed at 100 ISO in Kodak HC-110. As far as I can tell I did not light these pictures so I had my Mamiya on a tripod and I used the mirror lock up device and a cable release to minimize camera shake.

Yapa

Yapa,cholesterol and blood sugar

Yapa and Rosemary is not home today

Sunday, April 24, 2011

THE RAISING OF LAZARUS Duccio Di Buoninsegna 1319 Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth tempera and gold on panel

As a baptized Roman Catholic I can tell you a few things that I know. One of them is that in the Catholic faith you have many important feast days during the year. Some of them are Christmas, Pentecost, Good Friday, Corpus Christi, the Epiphany and Easter.

If you might guess that the most important of those feast days would be Christmas you would be wrong even though that day has become a commercial holiday that tops all others. Few might know that the Epiphany on January 6 is the second most important of all. The gathering of the three wise men at the manger represents the transferring (or the addition) of the Old Testament contract between God and the Israelites to include gentiles, too. The three wise men or kings were gentiles. Strictly speaking a Jew would tell you that a gentile would be uncircumcised. So on that day of the Epiphany we Catholics celebrate the fact that henceforth the Israelites were not part of an exclusive club to heaven’s kingdom!

The most important feast of all is Easter. It is important because if the man who was man and God, simultaneously, performed miracles, brought Lazarus from the dead, converted water into excellent wine, and who died at the cross, did not come back from death as He said He would, then all the preceded Him would be a sham.

I have often wondered why it is that only one of the evangelists, St. John mentioned the miracle of the raising of Lazarus. Unique to the account is that we read that Lazarus had been dead for four days. Christ had been originally to see the sick man but was held up so that when He did arrive the man had been long dead. Christ tells Martha, Lazarus’ sister to roll back the stone of the tomb and she interjects with the explanation that it would be an unwise move as her brother had been dead for four days and she added, “Lord, by this time he stinketh: for he had been dead four days.” Note the man holding his nose in the illustration above!

The parallel between the tomb and the rolling back of the stone with the same incident that is Easter Sunday only differs in that Christ was in the tomb for three days.

A previous Easter with Alice

Easter Sunday and the purple stain

Whence the Easter Bunny and Attila Richard Lukacs