In Vancouver, a city with a poor memory for what came before, I try to use my blog as a place to keep my memories alive and perhaps even jar others into realizing this tragedy.

It was on December 31^st 2015 that bandleader, clarinettist and saxophonist Dal Richards died at age 97. Until his last breath, except for being a little hard at hearing this lively and cheerful man was a delight to talk to and particularly to sit next to him at a theatre opening or concert. It was in a couple of them that he happened to meet my youngest daughter Lauren (now 15).

Who knows if my stories on how Richards’s first instrument was the clarinet may have persuaded Lauren to pick the clarinet as her instrument of choice in her high school band. We have gone to many of these concerts and she does very well with the instrument which is not an easy one to play.

I learned to play the alto saxophone for my school band and I noticed when I tried to play a clarinet that if one wasn’t careful several notes would come out of the clarinet if you did not blow as required.

Richards on any time that I might run into him would invariably tell me that the picture that I took of him was the best ever.

Dallas Murray Richards, 97, Lauren Elizabeth Stewart, 12, April 11, 2015

It is a pleasure to gang up these two pictures. I photographed Lauren on January 6, 2017. We tried to make the picture be in the spirit of the one of Dal Richards. It seems that I have thrown away all my white shirts. When I spied the T-shirt in an armoire where we keep family heirlooms I thought that it was perfect. It features Lauren’s mother Hilary (our daughter) when she posed for a Children’s Festival poster so many years ago.

As for Lauren who is a serious dancer doing the full program at Arts Umbrella the fact that she maintains her interest in the clarinet and playing for her school’s orchestra makes me very proud.

I cannot forget.

iPhone3G version

cyanotyped

While my wife was watching the Golden Globes I wrote up a few blogs and retired to our comfortable bed to share some quiet time with our cat, Casi-Casi. As things now happen in this century it was too much idle time. I had finished Jerome Charyn’s Winter Warning the previous day and I was not yet ready to start a new book.

So inevitably I went to my phone to check up on Trump on CNN. I spotted a page mentioning January concerts featuring guitar player Stephen Fearing. I noticed that his special guest is Oh Susanna which is the musical name of Vancouver native Suzie Ungerleider. I had suspicions.

In my files I found:  Ungerleider, Suzzie – December 2000.

I have almost no recollection of the shoot and I have particularly no idea why I photographed Ungerleider with the toys and the bicycle on the lawn. Might I have placed it there for effect? The horizontal version I shot with Kodak b+w Infrared Film.

I am pleasantly surprised that Ungerleider has not only survived and flourished but that her latest album A Girl in Teen City is nominated for three Canadian Folk Music Awards!

Good luck Ungerleider and it has been so pleasant to find you again.

Jorge Luís Borges

These first days of the new year of 2018 are for me days when I look back and try to see my way ahead. 

Today I thought of 1979 when I was working for a gay publication called Bi-Line. I was their chief photographer and the only one. Even though I was new in the magazine game I had to learn quickly as Bi-Line was a weekly the size of the Georgia Straight. Its editor, Ron Langen assigned me to go to a forest in Surrey in the middle of January to photograph two women and two men who would wear nothing. We went prepared with a large bottle of brandy to help stifle the cold.

The idea was to convey through photographs (I had a brand new Mamiya R-B67 and only one lens a 65mm which in the 6x7 cm format was close to a 35mm 35 wide angle) an Adam and Eve with two Adams and two Eves. In the end it was mostly about Adam, Adam and Eve. The photographs were (I was lucky) quite beautiful but I can only place one here that I have cropped.

Even though I was living in Burnaby this job was an exciting one. It meant I went to places like Faces, the Luv-A-Fair and many other gay clubs and I saw a world that was completely new to me.

One of the Adams was a handsome (perhaps beautiful) blonde ballet dancer and time has erased his name from my memory. I remember that he had an easy smile and was soft-spoken. Langen made me take pictures of him as Santa Claus. The one picture here is the only one that does not show the part that might offend.

I think that the Bi-Line experience (I photographed many nude young men and a few beautiful women of exotic sexual persuasion, many drag queens) prepared me to live in this 21^st century without having to feel shock at how the world has changed.

My only regret is that I did not right the name of the blonde young apparition of a man. As for the woman, Maddalena , she became my friend and she posed for me for many years. She now lives in Italy.

One pattern of the new year is that since I can remember being dragged into the digital age by my friend Paul Leisz and Celia Duthie I have been plagued by  almost with no exception finding myself without internet in those days right after Christmas.

This was the case this year and it took Sherlockian (or is that Holmesian?) investigation by Leisz, Benson at Powersonic Computers and of Dhalia a Filipina tech support expert in Manila working on the behalf of Telus to get to the solution.

Sometime around the 26^th I went to my computer inside my oficina in what used to be the garage of our Kits Duplex and I was unable to connect to anything.

The culprit, thanks to those three experts was a Telus home router that was losing its ability to send a strong Wi-Fi signal from our piano room all the way to my office.  I had a very efficient Asus Wi-Fi received that simply was not powerful enough to get the signal. All three gurus recommended a more advanced Wi-Fi receiver equipped with a USB connection.

The folks at Telus (very efficient) and Dhalia extraordinary with her sense of detail have programmed a technician to come on Thursday to investigate the status of our home router.

As a photographer I was always aware of Patterson’s Law that stipulated the Murphy was an optimist. In all my years as a magazine photographer I always brought duplicate equipment  of everything (just in case).

And so Patterson has dictated that my Microsoft Surface laptop would not charge and all I saw was a little red light. I took it to Best-Buy today and Akbar (an Indonesian) and Edgar (a Filipino) solved the problem that I thought was going to be expensive. Akbar pressed the on button and kept it pressed. And the computer (he said this was a hard start (came to life).

My Galaxy A5 phone had a bothersome new glitch. When I would attempt to answer an email I would get a box that said (ad infinitum) “loading messages”. It seems that this problem occurred to others at around mid-December. I believe the problem came about because of one of those feared updates. From the internet I found out how to disable a feature in my Galaxy and the problem has resolved.

So life at the Kits duplex is back to normal. Everything is working. Rosemary is in bed with Casi-Casi planning our trip later this month to New York City where we plant to see the Michelangelo exhibit at the Met and to have dinner at the Algonquin with Jerome Charin and his new wife Lenore Riegel. I want to make a special trip to that little old church in Wall Street that is surrounded by towering skyscrapers and that in its tiny churchyard it houses Alexander Hamilton’s grave.

Minor White         

Few in this century would understand the term editorial photographer or illustrator.

In that past century such a person would be shown (or couriered or faxed) a manuscript for a magazine, newspaper article or perhaps an author photograph for an upcoming book.

It would be here where reading the words would conjure in one’s mind an image that would go hand in hand to make the published article one that a person looking at the illustration would then be eager to read.

A specialized form of the above would be a magazine cover or a first page newspaper article.

In my long career as a magazine photographer I can attest to the thrill of using my imagination to illustrate an essay.

What this means is that I was forced to pre-conceive the idea and then realize it graphically with my camera. Sometimes my original idea would not fly so I would have to regroup. This whole process is what made it all such a pleasure.

In my blog I had left a blank for January 1, 2017. I wanted to look back after a few days of rumination on what to expect for this New Year. I have found this. I first wrote about it here in an essay in Medium.com.

All I can add to it is that my little talent for a Minor White preconception is alive and still well. Armed with it I may take a few more interesting photographs this coming year.

Previsualization and the Development of Intuition

Photography serves all kinds of image-making talent in mankind with an equality that almost amounts to a holy indifference. It does not distinguish the sleeper from the transcendentalist; it serves the first with its automatic mechanicalness, the second with its power to evoke the sense of light in images. It gives the spark of creativity in anyone a fine chance to grow. And from those people who have grown to love photography and master it have come three psychological concepts: Equivalence (Alfred Stieglitz), Previsualiazation (Edward Weston and Ansel Adams), and Response. (The latter sometimes goes under the name of “reading photographs”.) These concepts give affirmation to individuals who pursue consciousness and wakefulness by way of photography.

Zone System Manual – Previsualization – Exposure – Development – Printing by Minor White 1968

One time, Vancouver Magazine editor Malcolm Parry (sometime in the late 80s) threw a 20mm Pentax lens (mine) at me and told me, “You are making the motions. Go back and do your job.”

Garry Marchant, 1941-2017, never made the motions of being a travel writer. Even though Antarctica was one of the few places he had never gone to in his travels, I can attest to the fact that he was always enthusiastic.

It was when Yugoslavia was still under the spell of Tito (even though he had died in 1980), that I accompanied Marchant on an all-expenses paid junket trip to that country. The purpose was for him to write for his monthly Vancouver Magazine colum Far Away Places. In this case his piece would be accompanied by my photographs.

It was one evening in Split that we journalists were having a splendid dinner in a sidewalk restaurant. Marchant always made fun of the fact that in every restaurant we ever went to we always found towering white, heavily starched napkins resembling the Matterhorn on our plates.

Suddenly Marchant pushed his chair away and went running to the corner. Ten minutes later he returned with a grin on his face, “I spotted a woman walking a Dalmatian and after all we are on the Dalmatian Coast.”

And that was Marchant in action.

There is one story about him that I remember with glee. He had been traveling in some obscure African country all day and he was exhausted when he arrived at a hostel. He was also very hungry. Hanging in a fireplace there was a big pot with stew. He observed and using his arms as wings he gesticulated to the host. The host nodded positively. Marchant went at the chicken stew. It was only later, when he was spooning it, that he found remnants of a bat wing.

And few of us who are still alive (I called Mac Parry today to inform him of Marchant’s death. I told him, “And then there were none,” to which he instantly replied, “But some are left.”) can forget this article by Mati Laansoo in which he and Marchant sampled the culinary pleasure of eating dog in Manila.

In this age of staring at our smart phones I can only but remember Marchant and his enthusiasm for life, for food (except bats) and drink.

Garry Marchant died in Vence, France on December 23.

Courtesy of Kerry McPhedran here is a link to a Garry Marchant talk about the second oldest profession.

Marchant's long-time partner Marnie has informed that Gary did get to Antarctica and that he managed to visit more than 260 countries.