Me - That One Trick Pony (Or a Test Strip)

Nina

In the late 50s when I attended the Roman Catholic boarding school St. Edward’s in Austin, Texas I experienced having top notch teachers in all subjects. One of them, Brother Edwin Reggio, C.S.C. taught us religion. I was much too naïve that he was not really teaching us that but in reality it was theology with the philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas thrown in. I believe that this gentle man helped us learn to think.

Without using the word God he told us that we were put on this world for one purpose. That purpose was to find out what talent (or to put it in another way) or what we could do well. Once we found out it was our duty to do that. Our individual tragedy would be not to pursue it.

By the time I arrived with my wife and two daughters to Vancouver from Mexico City in 1975 I thought that my particular talent was photography. My idea of what kind of photography it was that I could excel at was hazy.

Thanks to Malcolm Parry at Vancouver Magazine and with the help of his two art directors, Richard Staehling and Christopher Dahl I was to find out that it was photography. I am not sure if Parry was serious but he would introduce me to folks as the photographer who made ugly women more so and beautiful women ugly. I took this as a dare. 

I believe now that I was put on this earth to photograph women of all walks of life and of all ages. Because of my two granddaughters I learned to photograph children and then to get that transition between child and woman.

Yes I like to photograph men, too. But it is the woman, preferably in some sort of undress that has a particular attraction to me.

I ask the women that I photograph, I ask my Rosemary, I ask my friends and many others to explain, if they can, why I do this. I have gotten no answers except from my wonderful and now departed friend, Argentine painter Juan Manuel Sánchez.

Every day of most of his life he would paint a woman (did not need models but painted from memory). I told him that he was much like Mexican photographer Manuel Álvarez Bravo who in his 80s was interviewed by the NY Times and asked to describe his day’s activities. He said he would wake up and have a breakfast of bread and coffee and then he would go to his studio to photograph a woman in the nude.

At my age of 77 I look at women in my studio with the neutral eyes of perhaps a gynaecologist about to retire. It is somewhere in my brain where there might be an inkling of excitement.

But I must stress that my enthusiasm has not waned as my questioning of why I do this troubles me.

We usually miss what we used to have and no longer have. We appreciate it once it is beyond our grasp.

At one time in my comfortable but poorly ventilated basement darkroom in our Kerrisdale home I used a technique that is universal in printing. You do not commit a valuable and expensive sheet of photographic paper to projection under the enlarger without first having little torn paper samples in a box labeled test strips. I would then project on to those little strips and see how they looked in the developer. I would fix them and the examine them by turning on the lights. If I was really critical I would force dry the test strip with a hair dryer as the blacks would change when dried.

Some years ago I was printing some negatives of my friend and superb model Nina Gouveia (alas! she now lives I Spain) and I came up with the idea of printing the negatives as negatives.

In my folder, Gouveia, Nina, today I found this test strip. I am so glad I did not throw it away.

I no longer have a darkroom. I cannot make these anymore. It is a valuable specimen of my past.

But I am not closer to finding out why I still do this sort of thing.

Am I a one-trick pony?

The process to make a negative print was slightly complex. I would change the bulb of my darkroom light to red. I would then use Kodak Kodalith (it was not sensitive to red) and project (a cut up piece of the Kodalith which was plastic and not paper) my negative on it. I would process the usually high contrast lith film in photographic paper developer. This made it in what we call a continuous tone. If it looked okay I would then place a sheet of Kodalith (usually 8x10) on photograpic paper (8x10). To flatten it all I would place a sheet of glass onto the sandwhich. Then I would project light from my enlarger (no negative inside). I would process the beautiful 8x10 negative.

But of course there was that bit of test paper that you see here that was that important step.