Photograph and scan 28 December 2024

 

Living alone with two cats now since my Rosemary died on December 9 2024 is a constant trip through pleasant memory and an unpleasant grief that does not diminish with time.

Advice of creating projects of distractions from friends and family who have not been married to a partner for 52 years, does not help. They will never understand.

I don’t drink and I don’t do drugs of any kind (except very large mugs of very strong black tea). I have come to understand that I cannot escape but I can channel my grief by writing these blogs and finding ways of associating my plant scans and photographs with the Rosemary of my memory.

In the last few months I have put emphasis on using my scanner as a tabletop camera. Today I photographed the Camellia sasanqua ‘Yuletide’ with a Poinsettia (Euphorbia pulcherrima, is the botanical name) and added the last photograph of Rosemary and me taken in August 2020. I could have placed the photograph as is right here.

It simply was more fun to incorporate that picture of Rosemary with braids that I took so many years ago and I had forgotten. I simply do not remember her ever having braids.

My Rosemary surprised me at all times when alive, and now dead, she keeps on giving me.

Jeff Gin - Boris Riabov - Nicole Langdon- Davies

It was in 1967 when I was in San Francisco that I was riding a cable car. A slew of young persons got off at a stop. I enquired as to where they were going. They told me that they were going to the San Francisco School of Art and that they were studying photography. That hit a chord in me as I was not aware that photography was art or that a career could be made with it.

It was not until my Rosemary, two daughters and I arrived in Vancouver in 1975 that I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a photographer. While washing cars at Tilden Rent-a-Car on Alberni my dream took some time and I found out why Alberta rentals had an electric plug in the front grill. 

Then it happened. I became a photographer. I often tell people that there are three professions that do not need a college diploma. They are writing (I was paid well for doing it), photography (in the late 80s I was charging a $3500 day rate for industrial photography plus materials plus mileage) and prostitution ( I never tried it).

Now in December 2024 I see that photography in Vancouver is in a privileged position. Let me explain.

We have The Lab which is one of the last places in BC and in most of Canada that besides processing all film will also do Ektachrome (it is called the E-6 process). If you do not know how to print The Lab will do a good job of it.

The Lab

We have Beau Photo which is a combination of photography museum, has the latest in digital technology in cameras and lighting equipment, has a huge fridge with film of all kinds including film you have never seen before. Important if you do not have the money to buy expensive lighting or camera equipment, you can rent it. The best feature of Beau Photo is their knowledgeable and helpful staff. They don’t intimidate and they smile a lot.

Beau Photo

For those old photographers like me (I am 82) who miss that institution on Granville Street that was Leo’s, there is Jeff Gin who worked there for 30 years. He now manages the Kerrisdale Cameras on Lonsdale in North Van. He will answer any photographic question with no looking down on you if you happen not to have an Apple computer but you own a lowly PC. My almost nearby Kerrisdale Cameras in Kerrisdale is also handy.

Kerrisdale Cameras

While I am mostly unable to convince some of my peers that I print inkjets almost every day with my frugal-with-ink-using Epson P700 and the amazing negative and transparency scans that I can do with my Epson V700, we live in a rich city with a long photographic history.

I did work in my darkroom for most of my life until we moved to a small house in Kitsilano. The West End Community Centre Darkroom Club has a fabulous darkroom with state-of-the-art enlargers of all kinds.

Beau Photo has a myriad of darkroom processing equipment for those who want to learn.

But few in Vancouver understand that one of the reasons Fred Herzog became famous (besides being a great photographer) is that for many years his Kodak Kodachromes could not be printed well by the standards of the darkroom technology of the day. It was the beginning of the scanner/inkjet combination that finally made his prints look like the slides he used to project in his home (I was a frequent visitor).

Inkjets of digital files, be they scanned negatives or slides, or files from your digital camera, cannot be replicated in the amount of shadow detail of the modern inkjet.

I believe that Vancouver is living in a photographic renaissance.

Patrice Bilawka - September 1996 - New scan 26 December 2024

New Scan 26 December 2024

Patrice One of the Boys

Patrice in threes
 

At Christmas dinner with my family in Burnaby I told Lauren, who was taking the group photographs that she was taking too many. With that serious look of hers she responded, “You should talk with those millions of photographs you have in your archives.”

I am not too sure if she is correct with her term of millions. Today I decided to look into old archives and I chose Patrice Bilawka.

In September of 1996 I pointed out to my friend Ian McGuffie that our sidekick photographic friend Bilawka was extremely beautiful. Because we did photo projects together she was one of the “boys”.

I decided to ask Bilawka to pose for me. This she did. She had no compunctions of taking it all off. I worked mostly with natural light and I was blessed with lovely window reflection shadows.

Today I decided to do one of my scanner sandwiches by combining two negatives. I liked the results. When I went to save it in my Bilawka file I found I had done quite a few sandwiches perhaps three  years ago. I am 82 so my excuse for my poor memory is my only excuse. 

It is a pity that all those art directors of the 20th century I worked with in magazines and good newspapers are now retired and journalism is moribund. They would be assigning me to use these techniques that were unknown then.

Brother Edwin Reggio,C.S.C. at Assumption Cemetery - 2013

I find myself now, often going to the Preface, page 19 of Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why where I read:

"We read not only because we cannot know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to diminish or disappear, overcome by space,time, imperfect sympathies, and all the sorrows of familial and passional life."

Because I am 82 many if not most of the people from my life who were family, friends or people I worked with are dead. Perhaps because of a combination of covid, social media and smart phones people that I know in Vancouver are reluctant to talk on the phone or to meet for face to face conversation. Some have ditched their land lines and the only way to find them is through that terrible and useless Linkedin.

It was a pleasure some weeks back to read Charles Blow’s (one of my fave NYTimes columnists) Making Friends After 50? Yes, Please!

Charles Blow 

The photograph of my mentor and teacher at St. Edward's High School in Austin, Texas is here because when I photographed him at the school cemetery, perhaps a couple of years before he died, he posed with the crosses on the tombs of all the Brothers of Holy Cross who had been my teachers. My first impression is that someone had lined them all up and machine gunned them. I was devastated to see that they were all gone.

And that is the way it is for me now at age 82