Portia Winters at The 5 dressing room

Susan Sontag wrote a book in 1972 that was titled On Women. She died soon after so her book was published posthumously. When I read it last year I realized that a woman’s situation now is not much different than it was in 1972. Sontag, in a nutshell wrote (not her opinion) – Old men have character, old women are ugly.

It is obvious in social media that sexist idiots will post two photographs, one of a young girl (do you know who she is? Years later, she won two Oscars.) and then of that same woman now 80. Rarely have I seen such a thing with male actors like Gregory Peck.

My favourite actress of all time was Rear Window’s  (1954) Grace Kelly (I fell I love with her particularly when I saw her almost final film The Swan. She married that man from Monaco shortly after. But luckily she died while still young so I will never have to look at her old face in social media and gasp.

In the late 70s and 80s I photographed 40 ecdysiasts (look up the word). In most they wore next to nothing or nothing. In 1980 I was 38 years old and I was mildly (?) obsessed with conveying eroticism. At the time I admired Helmut Newton. In my pursuit I often asked these ecdysiasts and others that posed for me what as women they considered erotic. On woman finally did give me an answer, “Yielding flesh.”

Now looking back at all those photographs with my new consideration of what a woman is (inspired for many years by my Rosemary) there is this one illustrating this blog that stands out. Her name was Portia Winters. I was allowed to take photographs inside the Number 5 Orange (The 5 for those who were hip) because I was shooting for an article in the Vancouver business magazine Equity. A writer convinced the then editor Harvey Southam that the article would be about the business side of the industry and it was ultimately called Sex Sells.

I took pictures in that dressing room and Winters never acknowledged my presence. For a while there was a youngish man present who did the hair of the dancers that were there. That was his business.

In 1962 and 1963 I was studing at a college in Mexico City called Mexico City College. I took philosophy for two years because the instructor was a fantastic philosopher from Barcelona called Ramón Xirau. Because of him I became a follower of Plato’s philosophy (that makes me a Platonist). His world was a perfect world of ideas (essences) and a poor copy that was the world of humans. He illustrated this in his allegory of the cave. In a long tunnel, at the end some men were chained to a stone bench and all they saw were reflections on the wall in front of them. Behind them there was a fire that degenerated the reflection that came from the end of the tunnel that was the world outside.

For me this photograph of Winters, she is sure of herself. She knows what and who she is. In short, she is the essence of a woman.

Portia Winters