The Metamorphosis of Death & Kissed
Thursday, October 30, 2014
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| Lynne Stopkewich |
In the early 50s after
my family had moved to Mexico City I was sent to the
American School in Tacubaya, a poor section of the city where enterprising entrepreneurs
had built the huge elementary and high school on cheap land. I was picked up by
the orange Colegio Americano bus. We lived in a semi-posh area called Las Lomas
de Chapultepec on a street called Sierra Madre. On the way to the school the
bus passed by the wall of a huge cemetery called Panteón Dolores. I have to admit here with
disappointment that I was never curious enough to explore it from the inside. I
can remember the moss growing on the walls and the sphagnum moss hanging from
the trees in the cemetery. Here and there from my window I could spy angels and
crosses. Alas in all my subsequent trips to Mexico I have never remembered to
go and take pictures.
As beautiful as Vancouver is it is poor in interesting
cemeteries. The policy in those after-life establishments is to manicure the
lawns with a ride-on lawnmower. Large memorials are thus frowned on. But the
cemetery on 41st Avenue
did serve me well once.
In 1997 I went to see
a Lynne Stopkewich film, Kissed based on Barbara Gowdy’s We So Seldom Look On
Love with the then Globe & Mail arts critic, Christopher Dafoe. In the film
the little girl (before she becomes the luminous Molly Parker) buries little
dead animals in her garden. She uses a blue box, the ones in which Birks jewellery
stores wrap their gifts. Because Stopkewich had a smallish budget she could not
pay for permission to use the box in her film with the Birks logo showings. Instead
she herself drew on paper a flower and stuck it on the box. As soon as I saw
the little girl burying the little birds and squirrels with lots of ceremony I
knew how I was going to illustrate the article that Dafoe was going to write.
I photographed both
Stopkewich and Parker in their hotel room. Stopkewich drew a flower on paper
for me. When I photographed Parker, she became for me the only other woman,
besides Charlotte Rampling I would readily dump my Rosemary for.
In the series of
pictures here you will see the metamorphosis of the shot. I am including a
colour one as in the Metropolitan Edition (Toronto) of the Globe & Mail they ran the
colour version. For the photograph I used a Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD with a 140mm
Macro Floating Element lens. The b+w film was Ilford FP-4 Plus and the colour
slide film was Ektachrome 100 SW.
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| The Polaroid |
