There are some words that my ears are all music. Two of them are Arthurian and Borgesian. Somehow those two words apply to my thoughts today.
My father, when I was a little boy, introduced me to the story of King Arthur and the Round Table. He told me of a magical sword, Excalibur, that only King Arthur could use. Many years later in 1990 I read Anthony Burgess’s novel Any Old Iron in which Excalibur magically appears in a St. Petersburg museum. Since then I have adopted that any camera that I own, when in my hands, is Excalibur, I cannot fail.
Jorge Luís Borges often writes that every first moment is repeated by subsequent first moments exactly like that firs one. In 1969 When I had been married not quite a year to Rosemary I had the idea of taking pictures of her nude (I was much too shy to shoot below the belt, waist!). I used an Asahi Pentax S-3 I had purchased used at Foto Rudiger on Avenida Venustiano Carranza in Mexico City. The camera was one year old but already the black paint had rubbed off. I saw the underlying brass as beautiful.
That camera has always been in my thoughts. My compadre, Andrew Taylor used it to photographs Rosemary and me in the University of Mexico’s cactus garden and by our blue VW Beetle inside the crater of the Nevado de Toluca.
By the time we arrived in Vancouver in 1975 I had purchased newer cameras and the Pentax ended up on a shelf. It was this last December the first when I went to Mexico City to photograph blind 91 old photographer, Pedro Meyer. I used the Pentax with the idea that I was taking it and me to our roots. The photographs were extremely sharp. The 50mm f-2 lens is superb. I was so inspired that a couple of weeks ago I used the Pentax again to photograph Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate, George Bowering. It seems obvious that my Pentax in my hand is Excalibur.
My Excalibur, a couple of years agom had its shutter button fall out. This involved a complicated removing of the top cover of the camera. I took it to Horst Wenzel. He repaired it and two weeks later he fell and bled to death.
With all those thoughts today I came up with the idea of scanning the Pentax with two negatives of Rosemary that I took in 1969.
I would say the result is both Arthurian and Borgesian.
