Swedish actress (I am old fashioned so I like that term) Viveca Lindfors told journalist John Lekich in my presence, “Actors act, writers write and photographers photograph.” By this she meant that you do what you know how to do well until you cannot. I believe she may have meant death. Lindfors worked until she died in in 1995 when she was 75.

That age is scary as I am 75 now.

My mentor, Catholic Brother of Holy Cross, Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. drummed into me that our goal in life was to find out what we knew how to do well and to do it.  He did not couch this with stuff like finding God or anything else. In some way Lindfors and Reggio were on the same page and I have never forgotten either of them.

I have not forgotten them as I pursue relevance in my life after saying, “no” to a request by the Georgia Straight to shoot this year’s Fall Arts Preview. That refusal firmly puts me into this territory that I write about a lot these days in that I am obsolete-redundant & retired.

But I am not resting my laurels to live a life of rosy past memories and hoping that some day Rosemary will pay good money to install a bench at the UBC Botanical Garden with a plaque that reads, “In memory of my husband Alex  Waterhouse-Hayward.”

So how do I pursue relevance without a real job?

The trick is to do something that I learned very well from two magazine art directors (both worked at Vancouver Magazine) who would look at a  photograph of mine, or a piece of new equipment and say to me,”Can you do this job with that approach?” The former Rich Staehling taught me humility by assigning me to photograph (and me a portrait photographer) sewing machines. Because Staehling (and American by birth and a graduate of the stellar Art Center in Los Angeles) had unique good taste and read the best of the American magazines like Esquire, the New Yorker and Vanity Fair,  he would direct me to taking my photographs in the styles of those magazines. Staehling also believed (damn him!) in cross casting. This is a movie film term in which someone you would not think of doing a part for a film is chosen just because he is not one anybody else would pick. So when I wrote a profile on William Gibson, Staehling assigned someone else to photograph the author (one I had photographed many times in the past). It was a terrible photograph!

Chris Dahl, the latter art director who came from a magazine in Toronto, Maclean’s that had lots of money, attempted to (successful he was) make me shoot assignments with elaborate equipment that sometimes could be rented but in most cases I had to find other ways of following his instructions. The most unlikely request was when he saw my Kodak b+w Infrared portraits and told me to shoot the beautiful homes in Shaughnessy for an article on real estate with that film.

Thanks to both Staehling and Dahl my style of photography really could not pinned down to one style. That served me well and gave me a very good career until journalism and magazines (that pay) succumbed in this 21^st century.

To stay releveant meant that four years ago my wife forced me (not too nicely) to purchase a digital camera. The folks at Leo’s Camera on Granville Street advised me to buy a Fuji X-E1and Geff Gin has been especially patient in giving me technical backup on a piece of equipment that felt alien in my hands.

But again both Staehling and Dahl taught me to apply a technique for one thing and to somehow adapt it to another.

It was in that way that I this week shot a “dream assignment” for no pay as I no longer need the money where I applied the slow shutter (1/15^th second to ¼ second) technique that I learned shooting the dancers (for fun, too) of the Arts Umbrella Dance Company to photography of the three performers of the Cultch Presentation of The Dust Palace (New Zealand) of their fab circus/theatre The Goblin Market.

After seeing the show on opening night I returned this past Wednesday and sat in the middle of row F (I warned my neighbours that I would be using a camera that makes little noise and has no lights that are on as the back display can be shut off while one uses the electronic viewfinder with the eye).