Saturday, July 09, 2022

 

Helena Bonham Carter Jan 1996

On January 1996 I had the pleasure of going to the Sutton Place Hotel to photograph Helena Bonham Carter. I had done my research and I had found out she had a Spanish grandmother. The writer, thinking that she might open her motherly instincts by bringing his small baby boy had a bit of a rough time. As soon as he was over I said, “¡Señorita Bonham Carter, qué placer en poder tomar su foto!” She answered in perfect Spanish. The writer and baby left the room and I had a wonderful time taking her portraits.

Somehow she located me and sent me a nice thank you note in perfect Spanish. Her agent ordered some of the photos. Some years later she was seen lots with Kenneth Branagh so when I photographed him I gave him a little pewter frame with her snap in it and I told him to give it to her.

 

In this blog I am including a couple of experimental effects. The vertical one is a b+w lith film positive mounted on a silver card. I like all the bits of stuff include in the shots. The second is what I call my scanner negative sandwich without mayonnaise.

 

 

Friday, July 08, 2022

 

Kodachrome

This 21st century is far more complex than the last one. In that 21^st if the black phone rang you answered it. Now we have multiple options and even the ring has been made obsolete. Your phone might alert you with Art Bergmann’s Hawaii.

Photographic equipment is now very complex. The mantra of the 20^th was “Form Follows Function”. Stuff looked clean and simple because it was so. Now, that has been reversed to Function Follows Form. Cameras are complicated and none have a button that leaves the camera as you want it. At any given moment that wonderful digital camera will exercise its prerogative of inanimate free will and do something that even your camera manual will not be able to help you.

Kodak Special Order 410

 

But for a long time I have indulged in a fairly complicated shooting technique. It may have begun in 1977 on Wreck Beach when I photographed a lovely MW with four cameras. One had Kodachrome, another had Koda b+w Infrared Film, a third had Kodak Plus-X and the fourth a new-fangled film called Kodak Special Order 410 (it subsequently became Special Order 115 and from there it was launched as the sharpest and finest grain film ever manufactured, Kodak Technical Film. Both the 410 and the Infrared film had extra sensitivity to red light and rendered human bodies beautifully.

Consider that I may have used the same lens with all four cameras so this involved screwing and unscrewing those Pentax lenses. And the speed of those films were all different so I had to be careful how I used my light meter. The Kodak Infrared Film camera had a deep red filter and the lens has to be re-focused to the infrared film spectrum. I could not use that red filter with the other cameras.

Kodak Black + White Infrared Film

 

To this day in my little Kitsilano studio when  photograph anybody I will use my digital Fuji X-E3, a Mamiya with two backs, one with colour negative film and the other with b+w film. Sometimes I will use a third back with Rollei 120 Infrared Film. And I might use a couple of Nikon FM-2s.

My peers tell me that I make my life much to complicated and that with one digital camera I can cover all those bases. My counter argument is that every one of those digital variations, (colour, b+w, etc) will still be that of ONE take. 

Kodak Plus X Film

 

There is a charm when your subjects may move or shift thepose while you pick up a different camera. I love that randomness.

And so for me sometimes Function Follows Form.

But this technique that I practice for my personal projects, was not always the one I used  for magazine jobs. Film was expensive so in the 80s I might have shot three jobs with one roll of 36 exposures 35mm film. Or one that used to scare magazine art directors was when I showed up with only three shots knowing that one of them would be the one they would use. And of course digital wedding photographers take thousands in one day.

And why not, here is a technique of mine in 2022 (45 years later from these Wreck Beach photographs) which is a scan of two negatives and since I scan in RGB I have given it a blue colour.

             

Thursday, July 07, 2022

 

 

Just about anything can be found if you know where to look. But to know where to look you have to know that it exists.

Profound quote by yours truly.

 

One of my favourite records is one that my mother had at her home school, Aluminio School in Veracruz, Mexico. She taught the children of ALCOA Aluminum which was based there. When she moved from there to our little house in Arboledas, Estado de México in 1971 she brought her belongings including this record.

When I wooed Rosemary in 1967 I would drive her to Veracruz and we would have romantic weekends in my mother’s house. I often took Rosemary to the Zócalo (City Square) and we would have the famous coffee (the best I have ever had) at the corner establishment called Café de la Parróquia which was next to the the main church (La Parroquia). We liked to sit under the portales (roofed corridors) because the marimba groups played there. We enjoyed the clanking of the old streetcars.

These marimbas were typically Jarocho (a nice synonym for Veracruzano) and they would make extra money when you made a request. One request I often made was to tell them that my soon-to-be-wife was called Rosamaría. On the spot they would play some obscure son Veracruzano (a Veracuzan son is a tune) and inject  on the spot lyrics usually describing her magnificent looks. Another feature of the marimba is that all the members of the group would have a chance to sing one of the stanzas in their own style.

This record Recordando Andrés Huesca has recordings made in 1940 including one of  La Bamba which is the best I have ever heard. The lyrics are modified to the taste of every member of the group (4 or 5) so you get to appreciate their different voices.

When I listen to this record I am immediately transported to a pleasant afternoon at La Parroquia over coffee with my Rosemary.

The CD in the photograph is by an Argentine young man who is a master of the chromatic harmonica. In 2019 Rosemary and I went to Buenos Aires in September. On a Sunday we went to Plaza Dorrego which is in the oldest BA neighbourhood of San Telmo. At the square there are wonderful antiques. Nearby dance groups dance the tango and there are some mimes, also.

When we were on the square I told Rosemary, “Someone is playing Astor Piazzolla’s Oblivion." We walked a few yards and there was the duo of Santiago Álvarez on the harmonica and Agustín Luna on guitar. When they finished I was exhuberant. I told them that I was an Argentine from Vancouver and asked them if they knew Alfonsina y el Mar by Ariel Ramírez. They immediately announced that they were going to play that song for their new Argentine friend who lived in Vancouver.

I bought the CD for $3.00.

Last December when I went as a widower to Buenos Aires I hired the duo to play a concert in honour of Rosemary at my hotel and I invited friends and relatives.

The book in the photograph is about a German photographer, August Sander (17 November 1876 – 20 April 1964) who dedicated his life to photograph all the professions of his country. From paupers, bakers, intellectuals and even Jews, that if you noted the dates you knew they would not be living much longer, he did them all and always with a tremendous respect for their humanity. Since he probably did not use lights he was careful to take his shots with a very large camera under low contrast lighting (overcast days).

I was inspired by August Sander when I photographed the serious (but really funny) Vancouver artist Rodney Graham.The blog with the photographs is this one.

A couple of weeks ago my daughter Hilary and I went to the Pacific Cinematheque to see Sunset Boulevard. For reasons I have not figured out we had never seen it. One of the best moments in the film is when Gloria Swanson does a personification skit of Charlie Chaplin for William Holden.

What is the link to all the above?

Yes you can find anything in YouTube. But you have to know it’s there. It is difficult to find it randomly, although random searching of YouTube is like the old-fashioned library card catalogue.

The Veracuz record is there in its entirety. There are two versions of Oblivion being played by Santiago Álvarez. There is a video where an erudite man explains the significance of August Sander.

And of course if you put  Gloria Swanson, Chaplin personification  you get:

Swanson Impersonates Charlie Chaplin 

And 

Recordando Andrés Huesca 

Oblivion with Agustín Álvarez and Agustín Luna 

Oblivion with Agustín Álvarez and a full orchestra in a French Park 

August Sander

 

Wednesday, July 06, 2022

Seance by Neil Wedman

This blog published 20 August 2022 I will put back into 6 July 2022 to fill missing holes.

Ikea Panda Bear 

 Luckily my Blogger blog has a pretty good search engine. Now with my 5635 blogs I check to see if I have written on a subject in particular before. There are two for which I have. One has to do with the humanity of inanimate stuff and the other is about routine and how that plays in my life in this terrible 2022.

 My friend Ian Bateson is constantly telling me that I am reiterating myself. He is right. But I like to do that and perhaps add to the mixture. 

At night, when I get into bed, and turn off the lights, Niño and Niña get as close as they can to me. In these hot days I have brought in a fan and they sleep on the foot of the bed and not on me. Once the light is out I feel the presence (I call it absent presence) of Rosemary on the empty spot on the bed on my right. And I grieve and this has not changed since she died on December 9 2022. 

To this idea of the absent presence I must now see it from another angle. 

Weather permitting in late afternoon around 5:30 in the summer, I walk with Niño around the block. Most of my neighbours and passers-by know him by name. I take the same route that Rosemary took and I follow her advice not to shout after him when he lingers in some garded. “Be patient with him,” she would tell me. That absent presence by the bed here in a back alley seems to need a different definition. 

  I have told my two daughters that when I talk to them I remember Rosemary but not in the same way as when I look into the eyes of Niño and Niña. Rosemary, the two cats and I slept together. That is an important difference. I have written before how a dead cat when immediately replaced by a new live cat, that live cat inherits in some magical way the catness of the previous one. It is almost like cats have a Platonic essence that can be transferred in a way that humans are not able to. I do not believe in ghosts and yet when I walk with Niño, does he also feel that absent presence?

Monday, July 04, 2022

 

English Rose - Rosa 'Darcey Bussell' & Hosta ' First Blush' 16 August 2022

 

This blog which I published on 16 August 2022 is now placed on 4 July 2022 to fill some missing holes,

Hosta guru Bob Solberg has been determined to develop a hosta with red in the leaf and he succeeded with this hosta. Hosta 'First Blush' not only has green leaves with red petioles that extend into the leaf blade but also a thin red margin around the leaf.

The above is from an identified hosta nursery. Solberg's hosta was introduced in 2016. My specimen was brought by some friends from the Vancouver Rose Society this year when they came to my open garden in the beginning of June. I have yet to see the flowers and I will have to wait until next year for a scape (hosta nomenclature for the flower stalk) to see how red it might be and the stalk of the leaf (petiole), too.

But today I noticed that one of my Rosa ‘Darcey Bussell’ flowers was past its peak and I thought the combination in a scan would be lovely.

Bob Solberg is from Franklinton, North Carolina where he has a nursery called Green Hill Hostas. Solberg is one of the most active hosta hybridizers in the US.

I have met him many times and I last saw him this year at the National Convention of the American Hosta Society this past June in Minneapolis. He gave a most interesting le

Many years ago (1992) he knocked on my door in my hotel in Columbus, Ohio (it was the National Convention) and when I opened the door I face a man who looked like an officer from the Confederate Army. He whispered and placed in my hand Hosta ‘Patriot’ which was the hot new hosta that had been introduced the year before. I felt like perhaps I was buying drugs.  But I was wrong about the man who has an easy smile.

Bob Solberg

He is obsessed with the idea of bringing red into hosta leaves, petioles and scapes. I wonder if these hostas will not come to resemble rhubarb! Are red hosta flowers next in his agenda?