Ex-Vancouver Magazine receptionist

It was in Buenos Aires when I was 8 years old that an American little girl came for a visit with her mother. This happened because my mother was teaching physics, chemistry and algebra at the American School outside the Belgrano R train station.

The little girl asked me, “Do you want to see it?" I must have answered in the affirmative as she showed what made me different from her. To this day I am not quite sure why so many women have not only showed me all that but wanted me to record it all with my camera.

 I took my first series of nudes (from the waist up) of my Rosemary in 1969 because of the idea of taking her portrait of her with our first daughter Alexandra. Right after I don’t remember the circumstances but I photographed her without our daughter. Those images with her haunting sad look have been in my memory and one of them is framed and on the opposite wall from my bed where she stares at me even when I turn of the lights to go to sleep.

Rosemary's Portrait on My Bedroom Wall 

In 1977 in Vancouver I was just beginning to work (free-lance) at Vancouver Magazine when I took some nude photos that coincided with some I took on Wreck Beach.

It was at Vancouver Magazine that a receptionist who was quitting (I have now forgotten her name)  asked me if I could photograph her in the nude. The two pictures you see here are in a file with the negatives under the name ex-Vancouver Magazine Receptionist. Both the photos from Wreck Beach and one of the two here I used Kodak b+w Infrared Film. It was sensitive to red so you might note that in one of the shots her lips are lighter. I soon learned to going to London Drugs and buying purple lipstick that rendered darker when I used this grainy but skin smoothing film.

Of late I have been reading a lot how all those medieval, renaissance and up to our present times paintings of nude women are called and explained as male-gaze art.

There seems to be no record if any of those thousands of women ever were the ones who asked to be painted in the nude.

I frequently look at myself in the mirror and I ask myself why so many women have asked me (and keep asking to date) to be photographed sans clothing. What can they see in my face?

And then there is that question that nobody seems to know the answer to which is why do they want to be photographed like that.

One answer may have been the call I received from this woman: “ Is this Alex Waterhouse-Hayward? My name is ….and I need to have some pictures taken. I am a fitness instructor at the YWCA and I want to be photographed in the nude. I have a great body and I want it recorded before nature takes it course.”