I went into my files today looking for pictures that would put me in the mood of a truly hot day refreshed by cold and very pure water.

When my Argentine relatives ask me about the charms of Vancouver I always answer with these words, “Air, space and water.”

There is no place that somehow reflects all those three than the long and meandering Capilano River at about the place where the Lynn Canyon Bridge crosses it. 

Era una calurosa noche de verano, un 26 de julio de Vancouver.  Me acosté. No podía dormir. Estaba inquieta. Dormitaba. Me perseguía un persistente sueño. Estaba en una capilla ardiente. Había gente vestida de negro. Yo estaba acostada y podía discernir una combinación de olor de velas y de gladiolos.  Hacía frío. Tenía escalofríos. Era un frío invierno porteño. Mi cuerpo lo sentía helado.

Al fin me dormí. Me desperté con la realidad de que anoche había soñado que yo era Eva Perón.

"Veinte y veinticinco, hora en que Eva Perón entró en la inmortalidad." 

And so I came up with the idea of inviting a few of them to my home so we could shoot the bulb (only those who preceded the camera with the accessory phone will understand that expression) to our heart’s content and compare notes about how we had huge day rates and were sent abroad on shooting assignments.

We had our pleasant barbecue with wine and beer yesterday (Wednesday).

Besides Larry Goldstein I invited Hans Sipma, Rick Etkin, Roger Brooks and Heather Dean. It was Etkin who pointed out that this bunch of old timers (Dean excepted as she just turned 30 and who happens to have a 15-year-old son) were in the original CAPIC members of yore.

Of the six (I must include myself) the bravest is Dean who used to hang out of helicopters in rigs that would induce vertigo on anybody. She took the ultimate photograph of the Shaughnessy Crescent (an oval not quite round park) and risked being shot down by police helicopters when she and her pilot husband skimmed Wreck Beach for a photograph for Malcolm Parry’s Vancouver Magazine.

Of Larry Goldstein, a self-effacing photographer who says he doesn’t shoot far out stuff but pleases all his clients with efficiency, accuracy I can only add that if most photographers were like him we would be considered a likeable bunch.

Rick Etkin is always ahead of everybody in cutting edge technology with the possible exception of Hans Sipma. Etkin was the first local photographer with a cell phone and he was and is the kind of photographer with a studio that makes those of us who work out of our home drool. As far as I can tell he is the only photographer in this city who ever bragged in his web page that he could photograph from the smallest to the largest and mentioned locomotives on the way.

Roger Brooks is the kind of interiors and architectural photographer who happens to know his craft because he studied to be a civil engineer but then decided to chuck the bridges and take the kind of shots that until the advent of digital cameras made his kind of photography extremely difficult and very hard to light correctly. But even though he made and makes lots of money he did lose his shirt once and took a most artistic kind of photograph of the lost shirt that was the marvel of light and composition.

Hans Sipma would be a millionaire if he had not squandered for so many years his hard-earned money from ad agency jobs in very expensive Italian bicycles and the clothing getup that accompanied them. Sipma may have been the first (and last as nobody could top the shot) to make the Vancouver Planetarium almost make it to the Kuiper Belt with rockets in one of the most memorable manipulated photographs I have ever seen. When you talk to Sipma (and Brooks, too) you realize that he is a seriously funny guy.

The best has to be last and that’s Heather Dean. I once had the luck of traveling next to her both ways from Vancouver to Calgary. It was (and still) is remarkable how a person allergic to everything except rice cakes and tinned pears can look so wholesomely healthy. Her ah-shucks and most pleasant smile almost manage to hide her prodigious skill in her camera work.

Watching these four (Dean like me is a bit high-tech deficient) do stuff with their cameras that have a phone as an accessory made me feel like Graham Greene. Of Greene, Paul Theroux said, “An Edwardian on a Concorde.” I felt completely out of their league and particularly in how Etkin took a picture of my picture with my venerable medium format camera (that alas! has no accessory phone attached) and instantly posted it into Instagram and shared it with all of us on the spot.

I did not sleep well last night. Two photographers, Etkin and Sipma were whispering in my ear, “Don’t shoot JPGs. Shoot RAW.”

The evening was so pleasant that I am sure we will all meet again and soon. If Etkin has his say it will be a baker's dozen.

For close to 10 years I had a happy relationship with two Argentine painters (Nora Patrich & Juan Manuel Sánchez). They were a couple where inertia was simply “to stay in motion”. I would call them late at night with suggestions of possible collaboration. They never denied any of them and we worked together with all sorts of “colaboraciones”. Our best was one where the three of us and another photographer (also Argentine) Claudia Katz spent close to a year taking pictures, sketching and painting one very beautiful Argentine woman called Linda Lorenzo. The result was a big show on South Granville called Nostalgia.

Bellavista, Buenos Aires - April 2016

I watch CNN and MSNBC and read my daily NY Times and Vancouver Sun always with that Genovés dictum in my mind.

As an old fashioned and obsolete (redundant, too) human from the past century I avoid art exhibitions that mention the word installation.

I remember and cringe a show at Emily Carr Institute of Art (as it was called then) that featured in its lobby a full-scale replica of a doctor’s waiting room complete with a stack of boring magazines. Could I buy such an installation and hang it in my living room?

I also don’t buy anything (and I mean anything by) that nude sartorial artist pair Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude.

I keep most of the ideas above to myself and I don’t rant about what is art and what isn’t.

It is far more fun and better to use up one’s time attempting to figure out what is in other people’s heads.

As an only child I never had brothers or sisters (until I discovered I had a half brother at a Buenos Aires police Station in 1966). I only had one grandparent, my grandmother and I enjoyed having a father for a scarce and sparse 10 years of which the first few disappeared in my baby memory.

I have two daughters. One of them has two daughters. My wife has a sister. I often wonder about the relationship these people, dear to me have for each other. How do you talk to your sister be it my wife, my daughters or my granddaughters?  Is there anything I could learn from that sort of relationship? What am I missing out on?

Proof that my interest in these matters can have a fruitful result happened some years ago after I photographed actress (I am old-fashioned and like using that word as well as aviatrix and dominatrix) Molly Parker and a director (Parker made two films with her) Lynne Stopkewich. I noticed that they seemed to have a special relationship based on the friendship between the two women they were (and of course my mother would have added, “Alex, you will never understand because…”. I asked them to come to my studio and that I would attempt to capture (and a pre-digital use of that digital term is appropriate here) that relationship.

We tried everything and nothing worked. I gave them a rest. During the break they did something. I told them not to move and shot a Polaroid. It was perfect. We all agreed. I then proceeded to repeat that very shot with b+w film and with transparency (slide) film.

I cannot explain nor begin to understand what these two women were able to share by the fact that they were women and friends. But I can ascertain that my photographs do reveal a bit of that. And I can say with some certainty that I am being objective.

Boot camp instincts  
The metamorphosis of death and Kissed 

During the years I developed several lighting styles to fit situations. I became very good with the small (not quite 2x3 ft. soft box. Part of my technique was and is to use it very close to my portrait subject. I became bored with this style and opted for Hollywood style hard lights, focusing spotlights, Fresnel spotlight and grid spots.

These days in my obsessive reading of Jorge Luís Borges’s literary output plus several biographies and articles in Argentine magazines that commemorate his death 30 years ago on June 14,1986 I sometimes think that the familiar old man (whom I never saw in person) will walk through my bedroom door.

For those who may not know too much about Argentine history I would state here that until we invented the cattle prod as an instrument of torture or slit the stomachs (so they would sink quickly) of “about to be disappeared” persons from a helicopter over the River Plate we did most of our killing with knives. While Argentines love American Westerns they did eschew until recently the “Peacemaker .45”.

Borges writes about knives and how men mostly killed each other not in anger or in passion but just to wield a weapon and show who was better at killing. He called it “la secta del cuchillo”, cuchillo being the word for knife.

Borges curiously writes about inanimate objects and gives them life. In one story several knives behind glass in a cabinet exist in wait for the human hand that will pick it up and use it to kill. The Argentine “cuchillero” would first go for the other man’s face and create a huge cut before dispatching him to the other world.

Borges thus states that knives like people search for their purpose in life. A knife without a human hand has no immediate purpose.

As I listened to CNN today Sunday July 17, 2017 I instantly remembered a short essay that Borges wrote on Kennedy’s death. It is all about one bullet, the same bullet throughout history. I will place below the poem in both Spanish and in English.

In Memoriam – J.F.K.

This bullet is an old one.

In 1897, it was fired at the president of Uruguay by a young man from Montevideo, Avelino Arredondo, who had spent long weeks without seeing anyone so that the world might know that he acted alone. Thirty years earlier, Lincoln had been murdered by that same ball, by the criminal or magical hand of an actor transformed by the words of Shakespeare into Marcus Brutus, Caesar’s murderer. In the mid-seventeenth century, vengeance had employed it for the assassination of Sweden’s Gustavus Adolphus in the midst of the public hecatomb of battle.

In earlier times, the bullet had been other things, because Pythagorean metempsychosis is not reserved for humankind alone. It was the silken cord given to viziers in the East, the rifles and bayonets that cut down the defenders of the Alamo, the triangular blade that slit a queen’s throat, the wood of the Cross and the dark nails that pierced the flesh of the Redeemer, the poison kept by the Carthaginian chief in an iron ring on his finger, the serene goblet that Socarates drank down one evening.

In the dawn of time it was the stone that Cain hurled at Abel, and in the future it shall be many things that we cannot even imagine today, but that will be able to put an end to men and their wondrous, fragile life.

    — Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986) In Memoriam, J.F.K. (1965)

In memoriam J.F.K. – Jorge Luís Borges

En 1897 la disparó contra el presidente del Uruguay un muchacho de Montevideo, Arredondo, que había pasado largo tiempo sin ver a nadie, para que lo supieran sin cómplice. Treinta años antes, el mismo proyectil mató a Lincoln, por obra criminal o mágica de un actor, a quien las palabras de Shakespeare habían convertido en Marco Bruto, asesino de César. Al promediar el siglo XVII la venganza la usó para dar muerte a Gustavo Adolfo de Suecia, en mitad de la publica hecatombe de una batalla.

Antes, la bala fue otras cosas, porque la transmigración pitagórica no sólo es propia de los hombres. Fue el cordón de seda que en el Oriente reciben los visires, fue la fusilería y las bayonetas que destrozaron a los defensores del Álamo, fue la cuchilla triangular que segó el cuello de una reina, fue los oscuros clavos que atravesaron la carne del Redentor y el leño de la Cruz, fue el veneno que el jefe cartaginés guardaba en una sortija de hierro, fue la serena copa que en un atardecer bebió Sócrates.

En el alba del tiempo fue la piedra que Caín lanzó contra Abel y será muchas cosas que hoy ni siquiera imaginamos y que podrán concluir con los hombres y con su prodigioso y frágil destino.