Espejismo
Wednesday, September 17, 2014
Tonight, Wednesday
Rosemary and I came back from the opening night performance of 4000 Miles, an
Arts Club Theatre production at the Stanley Theatre. I will write about this
play in the next few days.
I am in a state of
turmoil because I have lost a file called Family 2014. I believe I will
eventually find these valuable photographs (half of which I must admit are not
lost as I took them with my Fuji X-E1). They will be found probably slipped with
another file somewhere inside one, of the 14, four-drawer filing cabinets
that I keep in the basement. The room is amply heated so there is no humidity
to damage the slides, negatives and prints.
For the last few days,
I have also been reflecting (appropriate choice of word, you will see) on my
obsession with mirrors and taking pictures with them.
Last Week I had the
cover for the Georgia Straight in its yearly Fall Arts Preview. I believe,
since Janet Smith, the Arts Editor, calls me every year for this (am I the
oldest photographer on the Straight masthead?) that she must be anticipating
the day (soon now) when my widow will answer the phone.
The inside pictures,
five of them, include two which I took of two dancers and of two actresses in
front of a mirror. Smith has noted that this kind of shot has become my
signature shot (as former Fuji
employee and now photographer and father Gerry Schallie would say). I thought
about this.
Yesterday with only my
memory (faulty at times) I compiled into a holding file 72 such pictures. I
plan to put all of them into one big blog but I will also insert two or three
Jorge Luís Borges poems on mirrors. It seems that both these Argentines had a
fondness, preoccupation, repulsion, and attraction to the mirror.
For this much shorter
blog I will use pictures I took last week of Caitlin Legault in my guest
bathroom and one this week of my granddaughter Lauren in which the rear windshield
of my Malibu is the all important mirror.
I like the word, espejo, mirror
in Spanish. It has music when you say it. Espejo comes from the Latin, to see
or mirror, speculum but it still sounds like a Moorish (Arab) word like our
ojalá (I hope) which comes from the Arabic and is a variation of Allah wills. It
is further interesting to me that a variation of espejo is the verb espejar (no
longer used) and the more modern despejar which means to clear but also take
off. An airplane takes off, or despeja. Perhaps the labyrinthian back and
forths of meanings associated with espejo is the Borges attraction.
