A Timex, A Fake Rolex, Viveca Lindfors & Rachel Cairns
Tuesday, August 20, 2013
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| Viveca Lindfors |
Some years ago my friend, writer John
Lekich interviewed and I photographed the Swedish actress Viveca Lindfors. Because
I am busy observing the quirks and habits of my subjects I usually don’t listen
or remember what they say to the interviewing writer. I do remember that
Lindfors talked a lot about her love for Swedish playwright August Strindberg.
One of her most interesting statements I
now know (because Lekich told me yesterday and I am writing this on Sunday,
afternoon, August 18) was something like this, “Writers write, actors act and
photographers take photographs.” The statement might seem self-evident or
mundane but it is not.
It was my spiritual mentor and teacher Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. who told me and our class back sometime in 1957
that our purpose in life was to find what it was we did well and to do it. To
not do it was a tragedy.
As I live from one day to the next in my retirement
from magazine photography and other elements of photography that used to pay
good money but do not anymore I sometimes wonder what my daily goals should be
besides cooking for my wife, Hoovering the house and tending to the garden. Thanks
to Lekich’s conveyance of Lindfor’s statement I understand more than ever that
my mission is to take photographs even if the end product ends up filed in my
photographic cabinets. Some of the pictures do appear here in my blog which is
my de facto magazine. It is a de facto magazine for which I am the sole
publisher, editor (don’t do that too well I have been told.) writer, art
director and photographer. I am a photographer therefore I must take pictures.
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| Rachel Cairns |
And I took pictures today of actress Rachel
Cairns who plays both Viola in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night but also Ophelia in
Hamlet. I have seen both plays at Bard on the Beach and I must state here that
this local actress is very good.
But not being an actor I cannot understand
how she can possibly play a tomboy Viola one day and a most feminine and tragic
Ophelia the next. She can because she is an actress. I understand the
complexity of flash synchronization because I am a photographer. If what I write
is wanting that is because I am not a writer.
I was thirty five minutes late to my session
with Cairns in her
dressing room at Bard. Why is this since I am always not only on time but there
ahead of time?
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| The fake Rolex |
I can blame it all on a 27-year-old Timex that
failed this morning and a 25 year-old fake Rolex (purchased in Hawaii) that I may have set
back by one hour when I put it on at noon.
To make it all worse, when I finally did get
to the dressing room I was caught without a flash chord. Mysteriously it disappeared
between my car and the Bard tent. Fortunately Bard on the Beach publicist Cynnamon
Schreinert and I found a solution. I set my camera lens to a slow shutter and as
soon as I pressed it Schreinert pressed a little green button on the flash unit.
What you see here, the portrait of Rachel
Cairns is the negative peel of the Fuji
FP-100C Instant Colour print film. I used a Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD with a 90mm
lens.
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| The Timex |
