Fuji X-E3 - 18 February 2024

 

People say that Latin-Americans are more passionate. Perhaps that is the reason why I am excited about photography even though I am 82. And I will not use that hateful word "still"!

I always abhorred the concept of using photography to record. Sort of like a photographer I once knew who was recording fire hydrants.

When I take a photograph I try to be original. A friend used to tell me, “Alex, it’s been done before.” For a while I did not know what to say. One day I saw the light and I shouted at him, “I, have not done it yet.”

I remember going to shows in that last century at the fabulous Exposure Gallery on Vancouver’s Beatty Street. There was one photographer who had lovely bodyscapes on the wall and told me, “Alex isn’t it wonderful how a woman’s body can look like a Sahara sand dune?” I felt superior as I had done stuff like that years before. Then I thought, “Alex photographers go through different cycles in their careers. Few are on the same page. I must be less smug as they will leave their bodyscapes and go to the next phase whatever it might be.”

The Mundane Bodyscape

And lastly I dealt with pushy magazine art directors in Vancouver, Rick Staehling and Chris Dahl, and many good ones in Toronto. Their mantra was that my photographs had to be either unusual or different. Invariably they were right in their suggestions.

Could it be possible to record a fire hydrant in a different way?

While I am known as a portrait photographer, in Mexico I shot lots of street photographs. With few instances I have not done that in Vancouver.

Presently I am going berserk using an attachment called a Lensbaby on my Fuji X-E3 digital camera. My friend Jeff Gin gifted me a wide angle and telephoto attachment for it. Last night I decided to go to the corner of Lougheed Highway and Willingdon with the setup. I arrived when it was sundown.

A Lensbaby in Venice

I believe that my photographs are indeed different. I also believe that a photographer, just like a Wild West gunfighter, must be as good as his last shot.

Left- Helleborus x niger 'Honeyhill Joy' & Helleborus 'Honeydew' 17 February 2025

Today marked a beginning in my Kitsilano garden. I removed a few dead canes from my roses and some leaves. Then I noticed the lilac-coloured Helleborus ‘Honeydew’. Rosemary would have smiled upon seeing it as she would have understood that our garden had a pleasant future and that both of us would work at it to make it perfect.

At the same time I remember a striking quote from my one of my two (the other is Julio Cortázar) favourite Argentine novelists Ernesto Sábato. Until 1953 he was a nuclear physicist who for a while worked with Curies in France. He lost his excitement in the future of nuclear energy so he became a novelist. This quote below (in Spanish) is important. I will do my best to translate it.

"La fama es un conjunto de malentendidos, ya se sabe. Es vivir en una vitrina, y para colmo desnudo, porque no hay desnudez más genuina y terrible que la expresión artística, si es auténtica; toda obra de arte es una autobiografía, no en el sentido literal de la palabra, sino en el sentido más profundo y grave: un árbol de Van Gogh es Van Gogh, es su propia y desnuda alma ante nosotros".

"That fame is a combination of misunderstandings is known. It is to live in a glass showcase, and to make it worse, to be nude, because there is no more genuine nakedness, and terrible, than artistic expression, if it is authentic; all work of art is an autobiography, not in the literal sense, but in the most profound and serious: a Van Gogh tree is Van Gogh, it is his own and naked soul that is before us."

Somehow, if I am to understand Sábato, the scan here of the two hellebores, and Rosemary’s framed portrait are Rosemary.

And perhaps even me?