Clearing The Deck Part II
Wednesday, July 24, 2013
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| Kashmir Doll, Buenos Aires, self portrait |
But that does not mean
that it will be sad. I am going to have some fun.
The first problem I
had to surmount was to find a way of convincing Juan Manuel Sánchez, who lives
in a studio apartment in downtown Buenos
Aires to want to work with his wife Nora Patrich for
my sake and for old times.
Nora Patrich lives in
the suburbs (four blocks from a train station) with her new husband a
neo-Peronist who works at the National Library. Juan Manuel Sánchez has a
younger artist girl friend and their relationship is sort of a Woody Allen kind
of relationship. She show ups when she wants to spend the night.
At first Sánchez was
adamant that he would not tolerate his ex-wife in the apartment but he finally
relented. I would not expect Sánchez would want to take the train to work in
Patrich’s house so I have planned a session in his apartment of which I will
explain below.
Both Sánchez and Patrich share a friend (my friend, too). Rubén Derlis is a retired copyrighter
from the Buenos Aires
daily El Clarín. He now is a published poet who is extremely prolific. He has
sent me some of his erotic poems to which I have answered with photographs that
fit his verse. He has been so happy with this that he has proposed that
Patrich, Sánchez and I take erotic photographs and sketch and paint equivalents
with him present at these sessions to take notes.
We will be working at
Patrich’s house in the suburbs which is large, has a garden and a swimming
pool. Patrich has already found one model and I have found another, an over
forty American married to an Argentine film maker.
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| Rubén Derlis in Coghlan train Station |
But I have also found
another model who calls herself Kashmir Doll who lives not far from Patrich. But
I have told Kashmir Doll that she is going to go to Sánchez’s apartment and
ring the bell. Patrich, Derlis and I will be in a corner, flies on the wall. Kashmir
Doll will enter the apartment and Sánchez will deal with her as his model for
the day. I propose that the project be called (it is a wonderful cliché!) The
Artist and His Model.
Kashmir Doll will also
(with skilful use of blonde wigs) make herself look like Eva Perón. Patrich who
has the ear of the President of Argentina has access to a house where Eva Perón
lived. We will shoot there. Kashmir Doll also suggested a Swiss-born Argentine
poet called Alfonsina Storni who was a most influential modernist poet in Latin America.
My Wikipedia has this interesting
paragraph about her death:
A year and a half
after her friend Quiroga committed suicide in 1937, and haunted by solitude and
breast cancer, Storni sent her last poem, Voy a dormir ("I'm going to
sleep") to La Nación newspaper in October 1938. Around 1:00 AM on Tuesday
the 25th, Alfonsina left her room and headed towards the sea at La Perla beach
in Mar del Plata, Argentina. Later that morning two
workers found her body washed up on the beach. Although her biographers hold
that she jumped into the water from a breakwater, popular legend is that she
slowly walked out to sea until she drowned.
Kashmir Doll has
suggested we do something with this wonderful woman. I immediately thought of
the connection of Storni with Hamlet’s Ophelia. Swimming pools? Flowers? Who
knows where we will go with this?
If money were of no
consequence I would bite the bullet and purchase the only digital camera that
interests me. This is the Fuji XE-1. Just the body would cost me under $1000
and a $70 adapter would enable me to use all my Nikon manual lenses of 80s
vintage. But money is the problem and logic also tells me that I should not
travel somewhere with the possibility of it being the last time with a piece of
equipment I am not entirely familiar with. And should it fail what then?
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| Ophelia, Vancouver BC |
So I will take two Nikon
FM-2 with a 24, 35, 50 and an 85 mm lens. I will also bring along two Pentax MX
with a wonderful 20mm lens and a 50. The reason for two of each is that I will load
one with Kodak T-Max 400 (with the option of pushing it to 800IS0) and the other
camera will have Fuji Superia 800 colour negative film.
I will probably pack the
cameras in my hard luggage as I am taking my Mamiya 6x7 in my carry on. Why the
Mamiya? Simply because I want to shoot both colour and b+w Fuji instant films.
My only regret is that
I cannot travel with lights. But shooting fast and from the hip has its
blessings.
