On Friday I had lunch with two friends. One was the very good writer John Lekich, the other was a sharp mined beautiful woman, Nicole Scriabin.

I would have first seen her in St. Petersburg but I have never been there.

When I was struggling to write anything for magazines, newspapers and ultimately these blogs, it was Lekich who advised me to finish whatever I was writing with a citation found in the beginning paragraph. That has served well in all these years.

It was Scriabin who taught me to admire a sort of shy but gracious beauty. She greatly increased my business of photographing city lawyers who would demand that I bring Scriabin again as the person to do makeup.

Both Scriabin and my wife share one very important story in that I first met them by seeing them from their rear quarters.

In Mexico I saw my Rosemary leaving a school where I was teaching. She had long and straight blonde hair to almost her waist. She was wearing a miniskirt and her legs were astounding. Not too many months later we were married.

At a CAPIC (Canadian Association of Photographers and illustrators in Communication I was sitting on the front row of photographer Rick Etckin’s studio. In front of me was a woman in a short and extremely tight skirt. Her legs were like my Rosemary's and somehow it was all put together in such a way that her black flat shoes added to my enjoyment. Because this was back in the 20^th century I did not feel in the least guilty.

Sitting with Scriabin and Lekich in a lovely and intimate Italian restaurant in Trafalgar and 16^th Avenue I was trying to adapt to the protocol of this century. Do you tell a woman who is past 50 that she is beautiful? Is it important to tell her?

Lekich is the kind of gentleman (in the 21^st century we men can call other men gentlemen but ladies are now always women) who wears that little white handkerchief where it belongs and would never attach a bow tie (one that he would tie himself) to a button-down shirt. He is a gracious man who is obviously a product of that past century where we both came from.

As a photographer, a portrait photographer who invariably will buy the post card and not photograph the landscape, the cityscape or a sunset, my interest lies in people. These are people that invariably are more interesting than they seem and obviously more beautiful than that first impression. It all happens when you intrude on them slowly and sometimes by trick. Invariably people will show you what they want you to see in them. The photographer with some experience can pry more on the sly.

As an about-to-be-77-year-old man, I am long past the mid-life crisis and that young redhead in that red Miata. I have been married to my Rosemary for 51 years and I love her and like her exactly as she is now. Neither of us is in our mid 20s.

As I have gotten older my interest in taking photographs of women has also been in the direction of women who are closer to my age. The perfect 20-year-old on a desert island would induce me to feed myself to the sharks. The idea of Rosemary and her husband on that island would mean that we would learn quickly to enjoy coconuts. Sharks would not interest me.

For years as I watched my lovely roses and my Rosemary’s perennials lose their spring freshness and summer over-the-top beauty. I began to appreciate that fall decay.

Imagine me going to a 40, or 50, or 60 year-old woman and telling her, “I want to photograph you in the decay of your beauty that so reminds me of my collapsing hostas, and drooping Gallicas.” The slap would be instant.

And yet in spite of the rise of a genuine equality between sexes (and sexes not, the neutral one and the neither nors) old men photographed with dramatic lighting will result in portraits of men with character.

If you do this to other sexes, including those of the female (womin if you prefer) it is considered character assassination. Why?

The Scriabin I first saw from the rear and subsequently from the front had luminous white skin. The Scriabin at the restaurant had freckles! Could I convince her that I love freckles? Would I insult her if I told her, “If I were 40 I would want to be in the middle of nowhere with you where I would count all your freckles, one by one?

If I had the accreditation and the access that a good magazine would give me and the art director would say, “We want you to photograph interior designer Nicole Scriabin for next month’s issue,” I would have justification.

Do I have any justification otherwise? I would not want to consult Lekich on this as his confusion would not be any different from mine.

The only person who would give both of us an avenue of justification is a Swedish actress we both met a long time ago called Viveca Lindfors.

Taking a cue from the advice of John Lekich ( although not from that first paragraph) , I must state here that our lunch gathering has put me into a post-mid-life crisis of sorts. And consider that Scriabin does not have red hair. 

That beautiful woman does have freckles.

Beauty in fall decay 

How frail a lovely semblance is 
Vanitas Vanitatum

For anybody who might object or question the apparent fuzziness of the Scriabin photograph read here for my justification.

Many who may have known me for some time might remember that my interest in gardening began when my Rosemary made us move from a Burnaby townhouse in 1986 (we owed no money) to a splendid house with a corner garden in Kerrisdale.

We were paying then a mortgage of $3600 a month so we could not afford the neighbourhood Japanese gardener, Harry Nomura for long.

Because the garden had a lot of shade, garden books stipulated I should have hostas. That is how I discovered hostas and ultimately became a card carrying member of the American Hosta Society. Many of the over 600 specimens I had in that Kerrisdale garden came from the US in my luggage wrapped between newspapers. After nine eleven I ceased in this exciting contraband.

If the roses in our smaller Kitsilano garden are to be defined I would say they are sumptuous, beautiful and striking but I am not sure I would call them elegant.

Hostas, particularly blue hostas are handsome and almost remind me shapes I might find at MOMA. The flowers in hostas are universally frowned upon (perhaps when compared to roses) even though the species hosta Hosta plantaginea (called the August Lily) has flowers that are surreally white and have a delightful fragrance.

I might state here that the flower stalks of hostas, elegantly called scapes have elegance and beauty in spades.

American photographer W. Eugene Smith loved to go to his darkroom (it was a mess) with a bottle of Scotch. He would then turn on his stereo and work on printing a negative.

I understand this minus the Scotch, of course. In the beginning of my interest in working in a darkroom, in 1963, I would go to the one at the University of the Americas on the Toluca/Mexico City highway with my friend Robert Hijar. He was studying for a fine arts degree so that gave him access to the darkroom. I was smuggled in. To get there we took a second class Flecha Roja diesel bus that had so many forward gears that when it stopped for passengers it took it a while to get to cruising speed.

In that darkroom Hijar would bring a reel to reel tape recorder. Our fave recording was Focus with Stan Getz and Eddie Sauter.

I'm Late, I'm Late - Focus

The water in the room was so cold we had to warm it up with water from a kettle in order to have that all-important developer at 20 degrees Celsius. As soon as we discerned a vibration we would stop our activity with the enlargers. This meant that the bus, which we called the Toluca Rocket was on its way up the hill (to Toluca). The room would shake and I swear dust would dislodge itself from the white (!) brick wall and deposit itself on our negatives and enlarger.


Now three years and a bit more in our Kitsilano home my Kerrisdale darkroom is but a memory. Its particular smells (that fixer, that selenium toner) are still vivid in my olfactory recollection. The equivalent endeavour that so pleased Smith and yours truly is now experienced in a clean room overlooking the deck where I can hear Rosemary snipping with scissors. She is deadheading some of her perennials and our roses.

I sit in my comfortable bench with my monitor in front of me and I look at negatives from my files, particularly the ones with those contact sheets of yore.

One of the pictures here perhaps would have never seen the light of day. It is a grossly overexposed Kodak b+w Infrared Film. The wonders of scanners is that they can bring back detail that is embedded that was beyond the range of my German Componon enlarger lens.

There is a bit of that old Roman Catholic guilt involved. This is so much fun that something wrong must happen. Will it not?

And who would know that as I finish this I am hearing Focus on YouTube?

Sometime around 1988 we approached the then President of the Vancouver Rose Society for advice on purchasing roses. One of her suggestions is an English Rose that has been in our garden since. She is Rosa ‘Fair Bianca’. For years I have told people that she is named for the much more pleasant sister of that nasty and reluctant Katherina in William Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew.

Fair Bianca is a reluctant bloomer and not very vigorous. The plant we now have may be a second or a third purchase. When I look at the almost white blooms that have a heavenly (for me) myrrh scent I remember Janet Wood and her now gone garden in Southlands.

Plants and especially roses have a tendency to surprise. Every once in a while Fair Bianca does not emerge completely white. Note the pink dabs in this one.

Looking to find a quote by Fair Bianca to insert here I was amazed that Goggle took me to Shakespeare’s Othello:

         

This blog is about a mystery that finally has come to a resolution for me just a few weeks ago.

I received an invitation by Yukiko Onley for an opening at her VisualSpace Gallery that is a retrospective of artist Elsbeth Coop. The invitation instantly took me back to the Diane Farris Gallery sometime around 2001.

Many local photographers (including this one) were interested in an opening there that featured American celebrity photographer Greg Gorman. In particular we wanted to see a large nude photograph of Danish actress Brigitte Nielsen.

Diane Farris had prepared a surprise. She did not give Gorman a one-man-show. Gorman had to share space with a Victoria artist (unknown to me) who painted realistic female nudes placed in close quarters like corners, boxes, etc. I was so drawn to these paintings that I rapidly lost interest in Gorman’s works.

I was told that Coop also worked with the Victoria Police Department helping them with murder investigations through her ability to correctly show human anatomy.

And then Coop disappeared from the art scene. Every once in a while I would become curious and I would search the internet. But my searches took me nowhere.

In Vancouver I am an admirer of the output of Neil Wedman, Tiko Kerr,   Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun  , and Angela Grossman. They are not part (in my view) of that difficult-to-understand Vancouver conceptual art scene. Not that I don’t understand Rodney Graham’s humour. I do!

While I am not an art critic, I have seen enough art in my 77 years to consider Coop a phenomenal artist whose day in the spotlight has arrived. Kudos to her sister Jane for pushing her to exhibit. And Kudos, too for Onley for exhibiting her.

Brigitte Nielsen & Mark Gastineau

With Murray Pezim