We are just back from a 6 day trip to New York City. When we arrived in NY I was flooded with memories about it from my past.

My first inkling of its existence was one all due to my faulty imagination. In 1950 when I was 8 in Buenos Aires I showed a picture of a couple of American football players (in all their pads and helmets) with the background of the Statue of Liberty to my friend Mario Hertzberg. I told him (and I do remember this well), “This is a country of giants called Columbia.” It was probably a photograph from Life Magazine on Columbia University.

In that year my cousin Roby who was 11, came to our home in Melián 2770 in our Coghlan neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. He and his family had arrived in Buenos Aires from Manila via New York City.

At Roby’s house he showed me pennants of the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers. I had a hazy idea of what baseball was about.I had never seen any pennants except for Boca Juniors and River Plate, two Argentine football clubs.

For many years until his death in the 80s, Roby’s father, Tío Luís Miranda y Gimenes often told us about that wonderful hotel in New York City called the Taft where he and his family had stayed.

In 1987 I went to New York with writer Les Wiseman to attempt to get work. It did not pan out and the only jobs we got were from a tabloid called Trowser Press. Rosemary had put us in a hotel that had cockroaches and blood stains in the bath tub. We were horrified. We moved to the Taft and found out that not only was it a good hotel but that at 51^st Street and 7^th Avenue it was close to everything we wanted to see.

I returned in 1995 with my friend David Morton. We did not stay at the Taft but at a Helmsley Hotel.

This time Rosemary booked the Michelangelo Hotel (previously known as the Taft Hotel). Coincidentally our purpose for the trip was to see the Michelangelo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

I will probably write a few blogs about our experience, but right off the bat I must stress my wonder at how friendly the people of that city are!

  

We chatted with as many as we could. I particularly enjoyed the museum guards in the three museums we went to (the Met, MOMA and the Frick).

On our last day while walking out of the Hershey Store on 42^nd Avenue and 7^th where it intersects with Broadway I spotted two policewomen standing by a store. They had the friendliest grins. I asked them if I could photograph them. They suggested that I pose between them. Rosemary had some problems with her iPhone so a Jamaican gentleman volunteered and took the picture. We talked. PO Olivares on my left is from Santo Domingo and Smith is from New York. Olivares was carrying a Smith& Wesson and Smith a Glock.

I could not resist telling Olivares what my off-the-wall grandmother used to tell me. It hinges around this:

A dominicano or dominicana is a person from the Dominican Republic.

A dominico is a Dominican priest.

My grandmother, Dolores Reyes de Irureta Goyena would explain to me that the really tiny bananas are called plátanos dominicos. It would seem that the tiny bananas reflect something about the nether parts of Dominican priests.

Olivares laughed.

One of the special gifts of being a photographer, and in particular that of a portrait photographer is to see how time affects and changes a person as time inexorably marches forward.

On my first trip to New York City and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1987 I was astounded that they permitted to bring in a tripod and to shoot self-portraits. The digital concept of the selfie was years away. I took many but my fave has been the one here in which I share space with Rembrandt’s self-portrait. Thus it is a double selfie.

This time around (last week) I did not take a tripod (it is still permitted at the Met) because of security provisions. They always open your suitcase if a tripod is inside. And in some cases going into an airplane with a tripod in one’s carry on is seen as a potential weapon.

So Rosemary took my picture with my vintage (vintage is rapid these days) iPhone3G (it has no SIM 

card it is only a camera).

The other photograph is a Courbet.

For these pictures I was using extreme fine grain Kodak Technical Pan. My camera was Pentax Spotmatic-F with probably a 50 or 35 mm lens

In photography I have memory for terms that I believe have been lost with the democratization of photography in the digital age.

As an example in the realm of magazine photography who would know what a gutter is? That is the vertical line between the pages of a magazine. When I was assigned (and here is another term) to shoot a two-page-spread it was crucial to know how the gutter would affect my horizontally shot photograph.  A full-page bleed is a term that means that the photograph (either on one page as a vertical  or in two pages as a horizontal) goes all the way to all the edges.

I was known for using studio lights and for planning my photographs. I was known to use a stylist. In one of the iterations of Saturday Night Magazine I was expressly asked not to use lights or a stylist. I obeyed on the first instruction and the light was the light of a light bulb in a bathroom. But I took a stylist under the recommendation of my wise Rosemary. I was specifically asked to be a fly-on-the-wall. My subject was Gillian Guess.

Because there is less opportunity now to shoot in a studio most photographers of this digital age like to shoot what they see on the street. It has been called street photography and it is still called that. For me after seeing 50 or 100 projected street shots in some sort of photographic evening my interest wanes.

But, every once in a while, I see something that is indeed interesting to my eyes. I call it what it used to be called and that is a grab shot. An example of that is the picture on the top of this blog which I shot at the Met last week.

Another term that is perhaps now forgotten is the charm of the snapshot. In Spanish this translates to a far more interesting word instantánea. Several times I was asked to shoot portraits with the look of a snapshot. The idea was to make them almost seem as if they were snapshots.

Plata

And of course the problem (as I see it) with snapshots, grab shots and the like is that the photographer has extreme difficulty in imposing a personal style. For me that is the shame and the tragedy of photograph right now.

A personal style in photography has to be the Holy Grail. These days not even Sir Galahad would have a chance of finding it.

A small excuse for the quality of the two-page spread reproduced here is that my scanner is smaller than the two pages of a magazine. So I snapped (a snap shot) with my Fuji X-E3 in my office.

While living in Mexico City in the early 60s and 70s I had a German friend who would call me up and we would go on local photography safaris. They were exciting because we would go to old churches, parts of Mexico City and in the outskirts. What we did was and is street photography. I never did go (I kept forgetting) to the Panteón Dolores which is an exquisitely old cemetery in Mexico City.

When you are faced with shooting street photographs in a place like Vancouver I find it relatively boring because it is comforting (?) in its familiar blandness. Besides a few old gravestones in the cemetery on 41^st and Fraser I find it bleak for inspiration.

This is why I have rarely ever gone out with my camera in this city and take street photographs. I avoid cityscapes (during the day and in the evening) fireworks and sunsets.

My interest lies in the portrait in my studio where I control the light and decide when to take the picture. I do not wait for something to happen.

I believe that if Henri Cartier-Bresson hopped on a time machine from the past to Vancouver in our present he would be filing for employment insurance within a month.

So I understand why when Vancouver photographers go to Perú, or India or Mexico why they shoot lots of street stuff. The not-so-familiar is interesting.

In today’s blog I have two photographs, one I took in 1987 and the other a week ago. I shot both at Macy’s. 

I believe that each photograph, by itself is boring. But the juxtaposition of them both and with time having passed makes them a tad more interesting.

 USS Growler

A submarino in my native Buenos Aires is a concoction made with steamed milk and dark chocolate. A tall glass encased in a metal framework is brought to your table (in any neighbourhood bar/café) with a large stick of dark chocolate inside and a long spoon. It melts. In winter this is glorious.

Until the events around the doomed ARA San Juan happened a few months ago my knowledge of submarines was a bit better than average. During my stint in the Argentine Navy (Armada República Argentina) in the mid-60s I had to translate into Spanish some of the operating manuals for a GUPPIE (post WWII vintage) submarine that was being purchased from the US Navy. I went on board many times. I sort of knew what to expect this past week when Rosemary and I entered the USS Growler docked next to the USS Intrepid in New York City.

The Growler was that in-between old technology and new (atom powered) submarines during the cold war. A testament to this was a Regulus cruise missile on deck.

Perhaps the one feature that hits home when you enter a submarine like the Growler is that it has only one central corridor for aft to stern. And it is all green.

I thought that taking pictures using my dedicated iPhone3G (no SIM card) camera instead of my Fuji X-E3 was the logical way to go. Some of the pictures are not quite sharp. I like that.

A man from Costa Rica snapped Rosemary’s picture with her iPhone7.