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| 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.
