Monday, November 10, 2025

Molly Parker & Lynne Stopkevich - March 1997

 

Of late I have pleasantly noted that my Lillooet daughter Alexandra and my Burnaby daughter Hilary call each other every day. I call this sisterly bonding. It was only when I was 21 that I finally met a half-brother in Buenos Aires. The closest I have arrived at the concept of bonding was the very close relationship I had with my wife Rosemary. It all began when we were married in February 1968 and continued until she died in Dec 2020.

In 1978 when I had been doing photography work at Vancouver Magazine I was invited to a monthly reunion of contributors that was called a pissup. It was in one of them that I met a tall photographer with a radio voice called James La Bounty. When I asked him what kind of photography he did he answered, “I do conceptual portraiture.” I thought he was a pretentious SOB but I soon began to understand what he was talking about.

At first you faced an art director who gave you your assignment with some sort of explanation of what was to be done. This soon came with the questionable improvement of a fax. Then like magic I would receive faxed manuscripts of the articles I had to illustrate. It was then when I really began that interesting procedure of finding a concept for the job at hand.

With Globe and Mail reporter Christopher Dafow I saw a film called Kissed. After seeing it I had an idea for a concept. I had actress Molly Parker and director Lynne Stopkevich come to my studio. I wanted to convey their bonding.

When film director Lynne Stopkevich and actor Molly Parker walked into my studio on September 24, 2000 I had only one mission and that was to explain with one photograph my suspicion that a special bond existed between them. This bond had allowed them to make Kissed and the then yet-to-be released Suspicious River. Both films conveyed to me an almost alien point of view. I realized that this disturbing yet refreshing feeling was that both films were made with a woman’s point of view. I had been disappointed in the past by the films of American director Katheryn Bigelow as well as those by Nora Ephron. Molly Parker’s performance in Suspicious River is so astounding that I wanted to show in a photograph the invisible bond that must exist between the two women.

No matter what I tried I wasn’t getting anywhere. I told them to rest. At that point I saw them get really close. I told them to not move and I shot a Polaroid. I then shot it with film.

To me the result conveys that special bonding between women. The concept did not come from thought but from observing an instant. I wonder what James La Bounty would have done.

The photograph in the scan here was not the one that the Globe ran. I had a further concept wich involved going to Mountain View Cemetery as the film Kissed was about burying little animals and from there to a funereal human connection.

 

Sunday, November 09, 2025

 

 

I was very upset the other day when I went into my files of countries and cities and I could not find Spain. I looked and looked. Then I went to our family files that are dated by years. And that is where I found France/Spain 1985.

My Rosemary was an adventurous traveller and somehow we went to Spain and France with our two daughters. We flew to Paris. From Paris we flew to Madrid and we rented a car and drove all the way to Málaga.

In that huge file where I may have 150 slides and b+w negatives (taken with Kodak b+w Infrared film there were many prints. The one in this blog was at the Alhambra in Seville. Just because of my curiousity (generated by my idleness) I decided to compare a scan of the print with a scan of the negative using my Epson V700 Scanner.

I am unable to convince all those younger persons obsessed with what they call analog photography to the merits of shooting film, yes shooting film, but not making darkroom prints. We old photographers well knew the limitations of the darkroom to coax out from negatives and slide the details that were always there. The enlarger, photographic paper combination had its limits. I would use my colour head enlarger and partially project on my paper with the head in yellow (for some shadow detail) and then I would switch to magenta to get some contrast. To do this I would use Ilford Multigrade paper that we well knew was not archival. Note the yellow spot on the scanned print.

Once I scan a negative I use a 22 year old Photoshop 8 that does not invent shadow detail. The detail is there and  can bring it out. Then when I print the scan with my Epson P700 I get a result that surpasses the darkroom print. There is nothing artificial in the result. It is simply the way it has always been but the negative had to face the limitations of that “analog” darkroom.

Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad'  - 9 November 2025

 

In today’s grey Sunday I went to my back lane garden and I was rewarded by my Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad’  being in bloom. I was almost sad to cut it so I could scan it because it had two buds. But with the weather as it is those two buds might have potential energy to open but they will not. I knew of a Borges Poem in which he used the title in English (something he often did) called the The Constant Rose.
Below the poem in both Spanish and English.

 

 The Constant Rose - Jorge Luís Borges

A los quinientos años de la Hégira

Persia miró desde sus alminares

la invasión de las lanzas del desierto

y Attar de Nishapur miró una rosa

y le dijo con tácita palabra

como el que piensa, no como el que reza:

-Tu vaga esfera está en mi mano. El tiempo

nos encorva a los dos y nos ignora

en esta tarde de un jardín perdido.

Tu leve peso es húmedo en el aire.

La incesante pleamar de tu fragancia

sube a mi vieja cara que declina

pero te sé más lejos que aquel niño

que te entrevió en las láminas de un sueño

o aquí en este jardín, una mañana.

La blancura del sol puede ser tuya

o el oro de la luna o la bermeja

firmeza de la espada en la victoria.

Soy ciego y nada sé, pero preveo

que son más los caminos. Cada cosa

es infinitas cosas. Eres música,

firmamentos, palacios, ríos, ángeles,

rosa profunda, ilimitada, íntima,

que el Señor mostrará a mis ojos muertos

 

 

En La rosa profunda, 1975

 

 

                  The Unending Rose

 Five hundred years in the wake of the Hegira,

Persia looked down from its minarets

on the invasion of the desert lances,

and Attar of Nishapur gazed on a rose,

addressing it in words that had no sound,

as one who thinks rather than one who prays:

"Your fragile globe is in my hand; and time

is bending both of us, both unaware,

this afternoon, in a forgotten garden.

Your brittle shape is humid in the air.

The steady, tidal fullness of your fragrance

rises up to my old, declining face.

But I know you far longer than that child

who glimpsed you in the layers of a dream

or here, in this garden, once upon a morning.

The whiteness of the sun may well by yours

or the moon's gold, or else the crimson stain

on the hard sword-edge in the victory.

I am blind and I know nothing, but I see

there are more ways to go; and everything

is an infinity of things. You, you are music,

rivers, firmaments, palaces, and angels,

O endless rose, intimate, without limit,

which the Lord will finally show to my dead eyes."

 

 

                            Spanish; trans. Alastair Reid