My friend Ian MacGuffie often repeats something that fills me with nostalgia for those days. He cites the photographers who would walk around Stanley Park in that last century. Some may have had Nikons or Pentaxes hanging from their necks. The more financially enhanced would perhaps have Hasselblads.

Then this is what MacGuffie says that rings so true in this age of proliferating images that are not here or there.

“We don’t know if these photographers were good or not. They had few opportunities to show them anywhere.”

That 20^th century was also one of black and white, not only in photography but in other aspects of life. It seemed to be a century of absolutes with no strange and confusing grounds.

I have an acquaintance (one I hope with with I will have a friendship) who is a man who has changed her body. She has breast augmentation and perhaps she may have had modifications below the belt. At one time, in that other century I would have called her a drag queen. Now I am unsure as to the correct nomenclature. Obviously it is not black or white. It has to be another “colour” in-between or to one side or the other.

In that past century when I was a young man I could emerge from the confessional feeling elated and purified. That would not happen to me now. My beliefs have changed.

But there is one aspect of my life that is unchanged. Not only that, it seems to be stronger, more in my face. My taste buds are failing and there are few foods that please me. Of music I can only state that I do not want to ever listen to Bach’s Double Violin Concerto. I am done. I am done with it.

What is one of the few aspects of my life that is now enhanced and ever present?

This is my admiration, attraction, confusion, depression, amazement, wonder and many other emotions in how I relate to my visual impression of the women that surround my life. This could be the women that I know but also women who are strangers.

I am repelled by the Kardashian Factor which I define as my reaction to a banal perfection of beauty that as soon as it begins to fade surgery and other methods are used to freeze it.

I am instantly drawn to cleavage while being aware that I am admiring a concavity that has no material existence. I am looking at a curved space as difficult to fathom as Einstein’s space.

What is it about a leg or a pair of them that draws me to stare? Why is it that those legs below a mini skirt are so much more attractive (a beacon of sorts) than those seen in their entirety when the woman in question is wearing a bathing suit?

And my attraction to women is not only of women much younger than I am. I see beauty in my Rosemary even though I can remember those legs and everything else about her that I first saw 50 years ago.

To me it is obvious that this attraction is genetic. It is a genetic factor that makes the sexual organs (the exterior ones) of a woman so fine and their male counterparts so repulsive.

Are women less prone to the factors in that previous paragraph?

My Rosemary and I plan to travel more this 2019. Curiously we want to return to some of our favourite places like Mérida, New York, Buenos Aires, Guanajuato. Madrid while we have new interest in places that only Rosemary has been to like Rome, Florence and Venice. Could it be that there is pleasure in the predictable surprise of the surprising? There is no possibility we will ever want to go to Ulan Bator or Delhi. Is cleavage while much less complex than a face different and new every time?

I can remember being 15 and going to newsstands in Mexico that had magazines showing Brigit Bardot’s cleavage. If I had enough pocket money I would buy them and smuggle them in back home.

I don’t have to ask myself why it was I liked to ride buses in Mexico City in those days of my youth to spy on women who crossed their legs.

In brief I don’t think I am abnormal or different from other men. 

What does make me different (and this is where the crunch lies) is that as a photographer I can capture (this 21^st century photographic term has a good fit here in this usage) these memories and make them the realities of the moment of women who may pose for me in my Kits studio.

I can thank my proto-feminist mother, and my wife Rosemary) that I would never take a photograph where the woman posing is not in control or doing something I have persuaded her to do against her will.

In all these years where I have followed my star that is the beauty of woman I have never really felt all that frustrated about my photographs. I have shown (physical photographic prints printed by me in my darkroom) prints to friends. I have shown in the many galleries that existed in Vancouver before they became politically correct, shy and safe.

Now with friends that have died or disappeared or even because of a mutually fading friendship, my opportunity to show what I do has been diminished.

As the years in front of me become certainly short ones all I can do is to look at my filing cabinets, know what is in them (my memory has yet to fail me) and consider that I have had a life that is unique in what relates to the exploration of woman.

The way we exploded our divices, was to use large tin cans inside larger tin cans (packed with pebbles to make it tight) where we would insert a long electrical wire that at the end had a strand of a steel wool filament. After burying the can in my mother’s rose garden we connected the wire to a large 6 volt battery. The 6 volts were enough to make the filament glow.

That first explosion blew one of my mother’s rose bushes up into the air. We had buried our can under the bush.  I was given a whipping with a Filipino slipper called a chinela. But a few weeks later when the rose (which my mother re-planted) bloomed nicely I remember that she smiled at me.

But David Harris, who was smarter than I was in chemistry, told me that there was a better formula for our explosive that simply combined the potassioum chlorate with aluminum powder. Aluminum powder was sold in what in Mexico are special hardware stores called tlapalerías. The aluminum powder was usually mixed (we purchased it on its own) with a solvent (perhaps linseed oil) and used to paint metal so that it would not rust.

We made a very large bomb with his combination of aluminum powder and the potassium chlorate but moved our operations to a nearby empty lot. The explosion was deafening and the crater about ten feet in diameter. Perhaps because we lived in a residential district (Lomas de Chapultepec) the police never showed up.

We were delighted and built a few more of these bombs until we became bored.

Weeks later David Harris arrived with a vile in hand and riding on roller skates.

Alex, “This is nitro-glycerine.” We were both disappointed when our aluminum bomb did not set off the vile. David told me that perhaps he had made a mistake in the combination of chemicals and that he would try it again.

A week later my mother and I moved to Nueva Rosita, Coahuila and I lost contact with David Harris.

Through these many years I have been attempting to find him but to no avail.

This picture began as a b+w Fuji 3200 Instant Film print. My subject who had posed for me years before was not reluctant to shed all clothing. She had a wonderful milky white door that was partially translucent.

I took a few photographs and I was most gratified with the results.

Two years ago I might have monkeyed with the negatives. I still had a darkroom. But the fact is that I shot everything with my digital Fuji X-E1. 

As for the Polaroid/Fujiroids prints and peels I could not have done anything with them in that wet darkroom.

Now in this 2019 while I shoot film I enjoy the capabilities of scanning my negatives, prints with my Epson V-700 or working with my digital camera (or my iPhone3G) files.

A case in point is the enjoyable task of beginning with a workable Fuji Instant print and fixing it with my 13 year-old Photoshop. I dabble with contrast and shadow/highlights and then I go to Corel Paint Shop Pro XII. For the initial photograph here I used the Photo Effects – Time Machine with the cyanotype option. And presto something to entertain my afternoon on a gray Vancouver day.