Tarren - 25 August 2026

 

Tarren - my first photograph in late 70s

They say that the shortest sentence in English is – I am. Close, in my opinion is – It was. Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector wrote a longish essay about the fact that the English word “it” does not exist in Brazilian (or Spanish).

These days as I approach my 84 year at the end of August I think about stuff that I have done that I will not do again.

For many years, beginning for an article in Vancouver Magazine, I began to photograph ecdysiasts (look it up). One of them was Tarren. Through the years I kept taking her photograph and she became a special subject with which I had an unusual relationship.

This past Monday Tarren came back from a wedding in Winnipeg and stayed in my guest room until the next day at noon. We had long chats about her past business and my photographs and I fed her good meals. She had communicated to me that she wanted me to photograph her on Tuesday morning. I had no idea what she wanted. She is over 60 and obviously does not look like she did in all the photographs that I took of her. With those photographs I learned the term gluteus maximus. She had the best one I ever saw.

Having read Susan Sontag’s 1975 but posthumously published book On Women in which in a nutshell she writes – Old men have character and old women are ugly, I knew I had to be careful how I photographed Tarren. I also had to bring into my session with her that my idea of what women are has dramatically changed since I first photographed her in those late 70s. Important to that change were the views of my proto-feminist wife Rosemary.

Thanks to my knowledge of digital technology and the use of my Fuji X-E3 I think I have done justice to Tarren’s photographs.

And I must thank her for the opportunity to perhaps making this session, the last one I believe with her such a special one.

And I cannot leave here without mentioning that through the years I took lovely bodyscapes of  Tarren and that she showed everything. This time around she was reluctant to pose nude. I am grateful that she did allow me to photograph her from the back in my living room. I used my Mamiya RB-67 loaded with a Polaroid back and Fuji Instant Film (it is no longer available but I have boxes for special ocassions. In the photo above I bleached the black back of the Fuji peel and scanned it.