A Subtle Hot Shot
Thursday, April 21, 2016
In 1986 there was Expo 86 in Vancouver and business (particularly mine as a magazine photographer) was good. My wife Rosemary (consistently makes the right decisions) told me that we should move from our small strata title home in Burnaby to a real one with a garden in Vancouver. So we moved. I remember that the first few years we were paying $3500 per month towards our mortgage. But business was good.
Around 1988 my friend Robert Blake came over to the new
house and inspected my darkroom. He noticed the nudes I had hanging on the
walls. A couple of days later he called me and asked me to enter one of those
photographs for the first ever (there were many subsequent ones) erotic groups
show called The Eye of Eros at the Exposure Gallery on Beatty Street.
In 1988 I was a hotshot idiot and I told him that nude
photographs of women were not erotic. I told him that eroticism was in the
mind. I think I was out to lunch then although I would no reiterate that
statement. I told him I was going to shoot something new for the show.
For 1986 Vancouver
Magazine had hired me to direct a National Geographic style of shoot called Hot Shots to
celebrate the coming of age of our city (they changed the embarrassing 19th
century style liquor laws!). I assigned several very good local photographers
for the job but I shot three of them. One of them involved an incredibly
beautiful woman called Cathy. I was so taken by her that I decided I would use
her as my model for the Eye of Eros exhibit. Unfortunately (and Blake tried to
reject my entry) I decided to photograph Cathy (now Katheryn) in a white teddy
or slip in what was my version of the sexy woman you sometimes might meet at a
library desk. We used my word processor which was a Smith Corona PWP-40.
And here you have it. I later saw the light and Katheryn
posed for me without that teddy quite often.
