Art Nuko in Moscow - Illustration by Carl Chaplin

“La memoria es individual.

Nosotros estamos hechos,

En buena parte, de nuestra memoria.

Esta memoria está hecha,

En buena parte, de olvido”.

J. L. Borges (1979), El tiempo

Memory is individual.

We are made,

In good part, of our memory.

This memory is made,

In good part, by forgetting.

(My translation)

Vancouver is either blessed or cursed by the fact that as a city it began with photography and with a photograph. We may not have 500 year-old churches but we do have that photograph!

In my blogs which I started in January 2006 I write a lot about forgotten stuff that is in my memory and in my extensive negative/slide/print archive.

I  believe that Vancouver is a city with a poor and very short memory. A red carpet that is our reality is rolled out towards the future but it is rolled in from the past. That past recedes until we forget.

In this 21st century if it is not on the web it never existed.

There is one man who has the memory of an elephant although he is tall and slim, almost graceful, but certainly not a pachyderm. The man is Malcolm Parry who as editor of Vancouver Magazine, Western Living and other magazines in that past and disappearing century made sure that we would remember and will remember. In his weekly Vancouver Sun column Town Talk he almost always has some item of our city’s past.

San Francisco - Art Nuko - Carl Chaplin

A few weeks ago in his March 16 column he reminded us of:

ARTIST MISSING: The Vancouver Art Gallery’s BOMBHEAD exhibition entails 30 artists addressing nuclear-age “subject matter, strongly associated with obliteration and destruction.” Oddly, curators overlooked B.C.-based Carl Chaplin, a.k.a. Dr. Nuko, who painted nuclear detonations occurring over several global cities, including Vancouver. Among the works released as postcards, one — actually mailed from the then-Soviet Russian capital of Moscow in 1980 — shows the artist himself running from a blast behind the Kremlin’s Red Square neighbour, St. Basil’s Cathedral.

I met Carl Chaplin in the 80s. I wrote about him here. I have kept one of his postcards in my desk. His postcards reminded me of my own concerns about nuclear obliteration which I wrote about here.

I have faith that the nuclear button will not be pressed but I do fear for our cities past and its legacy.

Recently the Vancouver Sun donated two million negatives to the Vancouver Archives.

These are facts and quite objective.

It would take a minimum of 6 to 7 minutes to scan each one of those negs. Multiply that by two million.

Royal Flush -  Art Nuko - Carl Chaplin

Many of those negatives are colour negatives from the 80s and early 90s. Film stock is any variant of Kodacolour which is the same stock as of movie film. This film is highly unstable. It becomes brittle and it fades. Refrigeration somewhat delays the inevitable. My Rosemary and I saw Lawrence of Arabia when it came out. Years later the master negative (from which “prints” are made for projection) had to be restored. The sound (on the edge of the film) had to be restored. The death of some of the actors, Alex Guinness for one, presented a problem.

In the 80s there was a big flood in the Vancouver Sun building on South Granville. Many negs (including precious 4x5s) were damaged beyond redemption.

In my early blogs links to the NY Times still work today. Links to the Vancouver Sun are usually gone in a few months. This is a very important archive. Where is it stored?

What about the digital output of Malcolm Parry who by all accounts has more pictures in the Vancouver Sun than any other Sun photographer? How are they stored?

It is my opinion that the donation of those two million negs is an example of passing the buck which will end up on nobody’s desk but in oblivion.

As  for the Vancouver Art Gallery which has apparently forgotten Carl Chaplin in its BOMBHEAD, shame!

Addendum:

 Alex: You may be entertained by the attached address side of a Chaplin postcard from Moscow, written by Matti Lansoo, but possibly posted by Gwynne Dyer. 
Jumbo

Who is Matti Lansoo? For info on him and on Parry look here.