Saturday, March 31, 2012




















Light Leaks
A Woman's Face With Nature's Own Hand

Friday, March 30, 2012

My Mother's Red Shawl - El Rebozo Colorado
Michael Varga - Cameraman






When I was around 10 years old my father took me into a TV studio in London, Ontario. My family was friends of the owner of CFPL London and every time my father went to visit the owner at the station I would go with him. I would hang out in the studio and watch them work. In those days television was mostly live and very exciting to watch; even the commercials were live.

One day my father arrived to pick me up in the studio after his meeting was over with the owner and I said to him, “Dad, I want to work in this business." He said, “Sure kid.”

As the years flew by I always knew that I wanted a career in television and I wanted to be a cameraman. I was lucky to be in London, Ontario because I went to Beal High School which had a very good television course at the time which I'm sure still has, so I learned a lot about television production in high school.

In 1970 my family moved to Vancouver which was the best thing for everyone in the family. I now had to find a way to get into television and so I started to volunteer with Northwest Cable in North Vancouver which is now Shaw and I shot hockey games at the North Shore Winter Club. I then applied to BCIT and was turned down because they felt I knew too much about TV because of my Beal High School experience. They suggested I take a night school course which BCIT was offering. I followed their advice and took the course where I met Mark Forester who was taking the course as well. He was working at the CBC mailroom in the daytime and school at night. One day Mark said to me that the CBC was hiring people for summer relief work and I should apply for a summer job in the mailroom. The next day I filled out an application and wrote down my experiences at Northwest Cable as well did the night school, plus my TV course at Beal High School. I received a call for the mail room job but I was turned down. It was disappointing but a week later I was called by the technical manager who asked me if I wanted to be a cameraman for the summer...that was 1973 in the old CBC building on1200 West Georgia.

The CBC was now planning a new building at 700 Hamilton and needed to hire more people because CBC Vancouver was now becoming a big operation producing a lot of programming, mostly music variety shows. I was now a full time cameraman for CBC and working on all the top shows at the CBC at the time.

The best time in Television was from the late 1970's to the mid 1990's and I was there working with the best people in the business. What a fantastic time it was!

By the mid 1980's the cameras were getting smaller and more portable and then the travel started. I was very lucky and because of CBC Sports I travelled the world with 11 Olympics and World Cup Skiing for many years. Thank you, CBC Sports!

Being a cameraman for CBC Television for 36 years has been a real joy. It gave me a wonderful life and I met all those amazing people, from Politicians to Queens to Presidents to rock stars and just real ordinary people. I got to record history in this beautiful country from coast to coast...What a privilege.

I am now retired from the CBC but still working and after 40 years as a cameraman I still love it. Thank you Dad for taking me into the studio when I was 10 years old.


Bronwen Marsden
David Baines
Alex Waterhouse-Hayward
Lauren Elizabeth Stewart
Sandrine Cassini
Meredith Kalaman
Juliya Kate

Thursday, March 29, 2012



There was an earlier incarnation of what you will read below. It appeared here. But in the last few days I have been looking over the negatives of Kimberly. I wrote three blogs about her, here and here. There are more of her that I would like to run (tomorrow) and they involve a distinctly masculine look. So the purpose of today’s blog is to expand on the theme of the idea of men dressed as women, women dressed as men and some of the in-betweens.

Daisy Duck

My discovery of the sexes really began in kindergarten where I had the unusual situation of having the then famous Argentine Diligenti as classmates. They were quintuplets, two men and three women. I distinctly remember hiking up the skirts of the cutest of the girls whose name was María Fernanda. At a young age I was attracted to the opposite sex. I might have been in the first grade when confusion set in. I was in a colectivo (a Buenos Aires bus). A woman with a child got on. She had a big stomach. I had noticed this before and wondered what kind of a disease it might be. This “sick” woman had a strange creature in tow. She seemed to be a girl as the proof was in that she was wearing a dress. But her hair had been shaved off. Was this some boy dressed as a woman in some sort of punishment?  Further confusion happened when my mother took me to see films with Katherine Hepburn, a woman with a male voice who wore pants.

I was 9 when during the Buenos Aires pre-Lent carnival my parents had taken me to the movies. We were in the subte, (the BA metro) and there were many people all dress up in costumes. In the other car, I could see someone leaning against the back window. It was woman as she was wearing a dress that was all bare in the back. But something was wrong. The back was different. Instinctively I knew it was the back of a man. I was confused but too embarrassed to ask my parents.


While in Mexico in the 50s I could not figure out why women would not shave their legs. Some had lots of it. It was explained to me that Mexican aboriginals had not facial or body hair. Women who did not shave and men who wore prominent moustaches were out to show that they had Spanish blood and were “better” than the common natives. I did get used to seeing body hair in women and I must admit here that I am particularly attracted to women with dark hairy armpits!

In those years in Mexico my contact with the gay population was almost nonexistent. It was only during the carnival season in the port city of Veracruz, where my mother lived in the mid 60s that I noticed that gay men would dress up or dress in drag without any fear of retaliation from the mostly macho population.

In the late 70s when I was working for Ron Langen (read below) gay/bi-sexual publication Bi-line that I had my first real jolt in confronting sexuality in a way that was completely alien to me. I was assigned to photograph a lesbian queen. She was a queen in that she was much like a queen bee. She had all kinds of women cooking for her, washing for her and catering to all her needs. I was told to photograph her focusing on the fact that she was a karate instructor. Being a completely ignorant photographer I sprayed her face with water to make it look like sweat. Was I wrong! And I was much too inexperience to crop the picture correctly and allow her hand to show. But the most unnerving feeling (but only at first) was sitting with her (I have forgotten her name) and knowing that no matter how I boasted about this or that she was not in the least interested in me because I was a man. Then I began to feel comfortable in not having to posture. If I did not attempt to “pick her up” I would not bee deemed to be un-macho. It was most liberating.




Art Bergmann


In the years that I photographed Art Bergmann I noticed he went through a gay period in the way he wore makeup and in his body movements. It was at this time that I discovered that I had a feminine side, something that I have assumed most men have but keep hidden. I could see how women were attracted to Bergmann. I could see that my feminine side was attracted to the man that he was. And much for the better my pictures of Bergmann got and better.

In the last 10 years I have been taking pictures of women wearing my now a bit too small Puerto de Liverpool (a very good Mexico City department store) pin striped suit and my Sears Roebuck (the Mexican Sears) black brogue shoes which I purchased in 1972 and I still wear with the one suit that I now own that fits me. I have been having lots of fun.



Daisy Duck On Lougheed Highway & Willingdon Avenue

In late October 1979, stopped at a light on Lougheed Highway and Willingdon Avenue, I could feel the stares from other cars. The reason was my passenger, Daisy Duck. Vancouver's 9th Empress was applying lipstick on his lips. The idea of two men with moustaches holding hands on Davie Street (pretty common then) was completely alien to we who lived in Burnaby, so the sight of an orange-wigged drag queen was even more startling.

Art Bergmann

Yet the burgeoning gay scene of Vancouver had been kind to my photographic career. Earlier that month, I had come to the realization that I needed a studio flash system. So I went to my local Bank of Montreal, on Willingdon and Hastings, and explained to the dour, gray-haired, Scottish loan officer that I wanted $2000. "What do you propose to offer as collateral?" she asked. I placed on her desk a thick pile of Bi-Lines , a gay tabloid published by Ron Langen in Vancouver between 1978 and 1979. She eyed the centrefolds. With a barely perceptible smile she said: "I see you sometimes used a fine Scottish name as a nom de plume." In the earlier issues of Bi-Line, my photos had been credited to Strut McPherson.

My first use of the new flash system was to photograph Daisy Duck and the Halloween show at BJ's, the gay basement club at 339 West Pender (the building, a heritage site was purchased years later by Mark James) that operated between Dec. 4, 1970 to Oct. 17, 1982. For some years my pre-teen daughter, Ale, would show the pictures, such as the one here, to her friends with the challenge to guess which one was the only woman.

Art Bergmann

During the late '70s and early '80s, before the AIDS plague changed it all, it was fashionable for straights to go on gay club/pub crawls. These included the Shaggy Horse, the Luv-a-Fair and the Gandy Dancer. The more daring (and I dared!) would attend the mid-afternoon tea parties at the venerable Faces on the corner of Seymour and Robson. But for real fun, the reviews at BJ's couldn't be topped. My faves were the elaborately staged and lip-synced versions of Blondie songs like Heart of Glass.

Leslie and her H. Upmann

Until BJ's closed, I would often go to co-owner Brian to borrow costumes for my shoots. In 1982, I photographed Art Bergmann and his band Poisoned at BJ's. Art was going through a gay/glam period. I remember Sam Feldman (Art's music agent in Vancouver at the time.) being shocked at my pictures. "They look like fags," he said.

I last saw Brian at a photography course I taught for Emily Carr's outreach program in B.C.'s interior in 1989. Brian was one of my students. He winked at me and in a whisper told me: "This is a quiet community, so I would appreciate your discretion." Sometime in 1999 showing my pictures to Jim the former DJ at BJ's he informed me that Daisy was no longer with us as we looked back on what to both of us were far rosier times.

And when Ale's friends would give up, she would say, "The woman is at the bottom row, right."








C in my suit, tie and shoes



C in my shoes and tie



I & C my bus driver friends



Ivette in my suit, shirt and tie with my grandmother's Remington Portable Number 3

Wednesday, March 28, 2012



Sonnet 20  - William Shakespeare

A woman's face with Nature's own hand painted

Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion;

A woman's gentle heart, but not acquainted

With shifting change, as is false women's fashion;

An eye more bright than theirs, less false in rolling,

Gilding the object whereupon it gazeth;

A man in hue, all 'hues' in his controlling,

Much steals men's eyes and women's souls amazeth.

And for a woman wert thou first created;




Till Nature, as she wrought thee, fell a-doting,

And by addition me of thee defeated,

By adding one thing to my purpose nothing.

But since she prick'd thee out for women's pleasure,

Mine be thy love and thy love's use their treasure

Tuesday, March 27, 2012

More delightful pictures of Kimberly will see the light of day tomorrow but I must cook for my wife this evening and we will then watch a film on TV. But domestic affairs will not prevent me from leaking a glimpse into one of those photographs. As I was perusing them I noticed that the first two exposures of one of our sessions showed the results of a light leak. The leak was caused by not loading my Mamiya RB-67 in subdued light or perhaps when I unpacked the roll I allowed it to unroll slightly (as 220 rolls sometimes did) and light managed to get in to those first exposures.

The negative was certainly printable as the leak was minor. I believe that the effect is far from detrimental. It made me think that I would call the blog entry for it Light Leaks. And that made me think further that the title could be a complete sentence if you consider leaks to be a verb and not a noun. That led me to wonder if light leaks is an example of leaks as a transitive verb in what could be an unfinished sentence – Mr. Light leaks information under a pseudonym. Light leaks, is a sentence in particular if leaks is intransitive, which it is, too. Light leaks. Ice floats and so on.


And all the above made me relive the days of sentence diagramming which I must admit was almost fun to do. I have a notion that sentence diagramming is about as dead as the age of the halftone process – gone the way of Pontiacs, Oldsmobiles (and in particular the Oldsmobile Achieva), Kodak (and Retina Reflexes), Aires Cameras, film, portable Dymo Tape machines, and spark plug gap adjusting. And of course there are few examples, if any, of digital images that have been exposed to a light leak.

Monday, March 26, 2012


The innocence and blindness of youth is evident in the picture above. I mean my innocence and  a relative youth. I was 38 when I snapped the picture. I remember next to nothing, including the girl’s name, except that the store where I took this picture was in North Vancouver and that it had cult status. The store was well known for having a good stock of horror films. I was dispatched by Vancouver Magazine art director Rick Staehling to snap a picture.

I have been filing stuff in the last few days and the envelope labeled Video Girl – Horror Movie always leaves me at a loss as to how to file correctly. So I usually throw it into a huge pile of equally difficult to file photos. They are there because I have forgotten the name of my subjects or they may be family photos I have to consult with Rosemary to find an approximate date (at least a year) so I can file those in our family cabinet.

This time around I plan to insert the negatives and contacts of Video Girl into a file called just that.

Rick Staehling was a bit fussy about using pictures that might be a bit too sexy. He was very keen (an American by birth but Canadian in that most Canadian temperament to not offend) so he ran an innocuous version of the picture you see here.

I wonder if I was naïve or I actually made the young woman stretch out, and emphasize her breasts in the juxtaposition of the horror image on the TV. If there is some sort of Garry Winogrand/Diane Arbus weirdness about this photograph I must not take any credit for it. I went to take my picture in North Vancouver and I pressed the shutter 19 times. There are only two like this one. This is the better version as there is more stretch!

And the picture does have some archival/historical importance. Notice that behind the girl there is a Sony Betamax poster.



Perhaps, only now, I understand that there might have been another reason for the cult status of the North Van Vancouver Video Station. It could have been the girl herself.  For years I happily patronized Megamovies (now a Rogers Video Store) on 15th and Oak. There were three reasons for going there. They had a good stock (then) of old movies and there were two more, both on Virve Reid's chest.







Addendum: It is strange but I do remember the equipment I used to take the picture. My camera was a Pentax Spotmatic-F with a 28mm lens. My film was that extremely sharp Kodak Technical Pan. I used an umbrella and an Ascor (long retired) QC-1000 studio flash. And for the picture above of Virve Reid it was a Mamiya RB-67 and Ilford FP-4 220 with available light.

Sunday, March 25, 2012