It was almost exactly around 1978, when I was 36 years old that I discovered that beyond Bach and Vivaldi, Miles Davis and Gerry Mulligan there was something called Punk Rock. It happened at a Vancouver, BC dive called the Smilin’Budha. The band that removed the scales from my eyes and the wax from my ears was a band called  the K-Tels with an electrifying guitar player called Art Bergmann. From the K-Tels I explored other Vancouver punk bands. My two faves were D.O.A. and The Subhumans.

D.O.A. besides its lead singer, Joey Shithead featured an astounding guitar player, Dave Gregg, and a bass player who defied gravity called Randy Rampage.

Now we all know that rock ‘n’ roll like photography only pays good money to a few in some upper stratosphere of fame. I often wondered why Art Bergmann had fantastic biceps and Randy Rampage looked tough in his leather jacket and motorcycle.

L to R Sonny Dean, Grant McDonagh, Zippy Pinhead, Doug Donut, Chris Walter, Lynn (McDonagh) Werner, Randy Rampage, Susanne Tabata, John Tanner

 Thanks to Julius Caesar and Pope Gregory XIII (one Italian in cahoots with a Roman) we have a calendar in which in December we all reflect on the past year and think of the future one.

Because I am 74 and many of my younger contemporaries are dying of known and unknown diseases I think a lot about what my friend Abraham Rogatnick used to tell me when he was ailing with arthritis and prostate cancer in his early 80s, “I am not long for this world and I am glad of it.”

I concur and in this coming AT 2017 (Anno Trump) I feel that while I live in the horror and an anticipation of terrible events with that man in charge I find that comfort that soon it will mean nothing to me. I worry a bit about my daughters and granddaughter but at least there is the fact that they live in Canada and perhaps things for them will not be as bad.

I first met Michael R., A.K.A. R.d. Cane in the late 70s at the CBC. He was a young CBC PA who specialized at the time in huge CBC variety shows that brought all kinds of celebrities into Vancouver. He was low key and friendly so he had many friends and was respected even if he was a young guy.

I have re-connected most recently (you do the math). He now wears a beard and besides working on videos in LA and New York he takes his unassuming Sony digital camera out to the streets and photographs what he likes. He seems to like some of the edgy inhabitants of our city. As an example in these pictures which I took today December 14, 2016 they include his latest friend Betty Bathory who has more metal in her lips that I do in my belt buckle. But she is not scary in the least and she smiles often.

I took exactly three photographs today after having a longish reconnect talk of the good old times when the CBC was hugely relevant to Vancouver and to Canada.

For these shots I used my Mamiya RB-67 Pro-SD loaded with an old Polaroid back. I used two sadly discontinued instant films by Fuji. One is their 100 ISO colour and the other their remarkable 3200 ISO B+W. I scanned the prints but forgot to scan the last one where R.d. is taking a picture of Betty. For the three photographs I used a large ring-flash with my RB and a 90mm lens (a normal lens in this 6x7cm format). I purposely placed the camera crooked so that the lens would “see” the edge of the ring flash.

The odd looking photographs are the parts of the instant film that you peel (and we idiots used to throw away). I rapidly air dry them with a hair dryer and then after scanning them I reverse them in Photoshop. I then play around with contrast levels until I get the right look.

I look forward to taking more pictures of Cane with more of his unusual friends.

Teresa Brown had one of the most arresting faces I ever saw. Until a couple of days ago (I am writing this December 13, 2016) I had long forgotten her name. In fact I had lost the negatives. I could not find them perhaps because of the forgotten name. But I did remember that I had blogged about her some years ago. I could not find the blog because I did not known her name and I had no further references except that I might have photographed her in West Vancouver’s Lighthouse Park. In my Blogger blog search engine (it is excellent, Lighthouse Park did not bring up her blog.

I have never understood how a painter can produce a magnum opus and then see it sold to someone. We photographers (or at least this one) value our original negatives and slides. The loss of negatives is traumatic.

And more so, as tomorrow December 14 I am going to photograph her ex beau from 30 years ago (when I took the photographs of Teresa Brown). Her beau, a former PA at the CBC in the late 70s and early 80s now goes by the name of R.d. Cane. Hew is a very good photographer. He has a large beard and he is coming with a young friend with very short hair called Ripley. I wanted to show Cane those photographs.

In a conversation Cane told me that the woman’s name was Teresa Brown. That did not help but yesterday December12th when I went to Vancouver’s Granville Island to pick up my youngest granddaughter Lauren, 14, from her ballet and modern dance class I remembered.

In the very early 80s I was the stills photographer for a CBC drama show that was being shot in a lovely place called Egmont in BC. My shoots happened on weekends during a long summer. The show featured a de Havilland Beaver which would pick me up Friday afternoon and bring me back Sunday evening. In one of those returns I spotted what I thought was a hallucination. It was a Greek temple on a rocky promontory in West Vancouver. I asked the pilot who told me it was called Parthenon Place. A very rich Greek business man had built the small replica of the Parthenon for his homesick wife.

And it was there where I photographed Teresa Brown. I punched in Parthenon Place and found this.

I thought I would give Teresa a second go-around and I re-scanned and re-interpreted them.

In 1975 when my wife, two daughters and I moved from Mexico City to Vancouver it was a shocking new territory for us. We adjusted little by little to life here.

Because we had little money we rented a town house in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby. It had a large basement with a garage. I converted the basement garage into a studio and the rest of  it into a very nice dark room. In Mexico I had a darkroom in a bathroom. Here I had a darkroom with a bathroom.

To no avail was I able to find a job as a photographer so for a couple of years I worked at Tilden Rent-a-Car on Alberni Street in downtown Vancouver.

A Filipino friend told me that Vancouver had a clothing optional beach called Wreck Beach by the University of British Columbia. I decided to  explore it.

My wife did not approve of the fact that I seemed to waste my spare time at the beach in the summer. I could not explain to her that my menial job with its revolving shifts left we wasted.

It was in Wreck Beach that I discovered a liking to taking pictures of unclothed women. I watched photographers do it and how their models were willing subjects.

I was befriended by a few souls who said they lived in a nearby area called Kitsilano. They told me this is where Vancouver’s hippies hung out. In fact there was a hippy publication called the Georgia Straight that had its headquarters on 4^th Avenue which was the core area for hippies who liked to drink their red zinger tea at the Soft Rock Café.

My first willing subject for the kind of photography I was keen on was a lovely woman called April. I took many photographs of her and I must stress here that I had no idea of what I was doing. I used my screw mount Pentaxes loaded with Kodak B+W infrared film or with a then experimental and very sharp Kodak b+w film (designed for solar flare photography) called Special Order 410.

My youngest daughter, her husband and two daughters have moved to Burnaby and this 74 year-old man and his Rosemary are now living in Kitsilano. I have Kodak B+W Infrared Film in my fridge. I wonder where April is this December.

April in October at the Safeway counter

And if some guy with a heavy DSLR hanging from his or her neck were to ask me what I do I would answer exactly like La Bounty.

Photograph - Nora Patrich

As a photographer I do not understand these selfie times. I hate having my own photograph taken but when I do allow it I find it almost liberating not having to think how to compose the photograph. I just sit there but I am willing to take the instructions of the photographer. I do enjoy including myself sometimes when my subjects look into a mirror.

In the early 90s I received a phone call from friend writer William Gibson. He was all excited about a porn magazine called Future Sex. He told me that few could object to it at the editor was a woman and that her name was Lisa Palac. It seems that her boyfriend was the editor of a well regarded mens’style magazine. In short order I sold a portrait of Gibson for Issue 4 of the  magazine for a story called Test Dicking the Force Feedback Vagina. I thought that would be my first and last contribution to a porn magazine. I received a phone call from Palac telling me that Gibson had informed her of my penchant for erotic photographs. She asked me to submit one. So, yes I have contributed twice (Issue 5) for that short-lived porn magazine.

Future Sex - Issue 5

As I get older I have not changed my focus on what I photograph. There is rarely a what and most often it is a who. My game is the photography of people.

I have lived in Canada since 1975 and because of it I find that I am politically correct when I can and when I shoot I think of the possible repercussions of my click. As an example of this Canadian attitude I can cite my trips to my native city of Buenos Aires and arguing with my nephews as to why there are still ads for toothpaste featuring young women in bikinis. The scoff at this and question my manhood! 

 

Sometime in 2000 I participated in a three-person show featuring the female nude. Unlike the other two photographers my photographs showed the faces of the women. In Vancouver there is a tradition (I am ambivalent on it) of having a guest book for comments. I received several, “Thank you for showing us the faces.” It seems that many of the women of the time objected to the idea of objectifying a woman’s body by showing parts.

Now with the fierce advent of the internet and social media posting a nude on line and showing a face can have dire consequences. In the past those nudes ended up as contact sheets, slides or negatives in a file in a dark corner of the photographer’s home. That is now history although as I write this I am surrounded by many all-metal and old-fashioned file cabinets full of the photographic output of my life.

Photograph - Juan Manuel Sánchez

I have curiously thought of how as human beings we are wired for certain tendencies. Our built-in self-preservation makes suicide a difficult task for just about anybody. One must think what will push someone into that corner. The same goes with the idea of a man my age, 74, to look at anybody under 20 with Jimmy Carter’s lust in my heart. The body rebels on that.

Thus at this age of mine I am interested in the faces and bodies of women much older and closer to my own. It must be built-in, I believe.

I have as a man never understood fully man’s (as in the male of the human species) our almost obsession with a woman’s breasts and particularly with the empty space between them. I have cited before in other blogs that American photographer Bert Stern pioneered a special lighting combination to enhance cleavage for Cosmopolitan Magazine.

With Juan Manuel Sánchez - Photograph - Nora Patrich

I have never understood and more so now social media’s disapproval in showing female nipples while ignoring that of the male’s.I have explained before my suspicion that many men (as many as women) have or not have sensitivity in that area.I have a Vancouver friend, Vince Hemingson who places photographs of undraped women in Facebook and has a special tool he invented that whisks away those nasty nipples.

Acapulco, Guerrero - Photograph taken by Acapulco Chief of the Federal Police Licenciado Felipe Ferrer Junco

 

And going down to the paises bajos (the Lower Countries) as my grandmother called that body area below the belt I must confess that I don’t think I am the only man (as in the male of the species but at the same time understanding that a gay man may object) who sees the male sexual organ as something lacking in total beauty.