Niño & Niña

Each time a woman lies about her age she becomes an accomplice in her underdevelopment as a human being.

Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society’s double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then into obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier – and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.

1972 – Susan Sontag- On Women – Copyright 2023 by the Estate of Susan Sontag.

 Some beginning to read this might wonder why I am using a phone photograph of my two cats Niño and Niña on our bed with Sontag’s book.

In the late 70s, 80s and in beginning of the 90s I photographed many Vancouver ecdysiasts. I was trusted, so I was even given access into their verboten dressing rooms. A couple of days ago I was interviewed at home by two women who are starting the project of making a documentary on the exotic dancing seen in Vancouver until now. They tape recorded me and plan to return next week with a video camera.

One of the women is the daughter of famous dancer in the late 70s at the Number 5 Orange Bar. She is lovely and intelligent and showed me nude photographs of her mother with a not-in-the-least understated smile.

On a whim I wrote to her and asked her if she would pose for me in the spirit of things. I received a very quick and enthusiastic, “Yes!”

While I am excited about the project, in my career as a magazine, I was constantly pushed by pushy art directors to “do it differently”. While my dancer photographs were mostly portraits and never cheesy, I cannot approach these photographs with a last-century mentality.

This is especially so as I finished Sontag’s book a couple of days ago. Reading it I could not help but compare her liberated woman of 1975 to that of my liberated Rosemary. It was she who made all the decisions in our life together and thanks to her I never have to worry about where the next buck is going to come from.

Will I have to persuade this woman not to take all her clothes off? Because she is inspired by her mother’s former profession, she is keen on imitating the photograph she showed me of her fully nude.

So how am I to combine in a photograph that 80s ecdysiast portrait I so often took, while giving it a modern approach? I know how I am going to start. In the late 70s one of the first dancers I photographed was T. I took my photograph of her reflected in a Mexican 8-sided mirror. I still have that mirror by my entrance.