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| Cheri |
I married my
Rosemary in Mexico City on 8 February 1968. On my whim I asked her to pose nude
for me in 1969. I was a tad conservative so I shot her from the waist up. That
photograph, framed, stares at me from the wall opposite my bed. She stares
because I had my camera at eye level. Most of my portraits are like that.
In 1973 we
drove in our Beetle from Mexico City to San Francisco. I decided I would go
alone to see the film Deep Throat. Whatever I might have thought of the film was
destroyed by two men in front of me loudly munching on popcorn.
When we
moved to Vancouver in 1975, I could not get much work as a photographer. By 1977
I was spending lazy days at Wreck Beach. Rosemary kept telling me I was wasting
my time. It was there were I took my first full nudes. I will even show my
first ever of a woman called April. I used b+w Kodak Infrared film.
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| April Wreck Beach |
By the late
70s and 80s I was taking pictures of most of our city’s exotic dancers
(ecdysiasts is the word I like). I do not think I ever demeaned any of them and
perhaps because of that I was so trusted that I was one of the few men that was
ever allowed to take photographs in their dressing rooms.
People often
ask me how this affected my Rosemary. My only answer is that I never touched
any of them.
Photographing
people (men or women) nude is like artists drawing in studio nude sessions. It
prepares you to know how a body moves. This helps when you photograph them with
clothes on either in fashion or in portraiture. My Rosemary taught me to note
and to photograph hands properly.
As I moved on
to magazine work I did les of this nude stuff except that I was obsessed with
displaying eroticism. I asked many of my subjects to define it. A model for me
was photographer Helmut Newton.
Little by
little the influence of my feminist wife made me retreat from that erotic idea
and I went into unclothed portraiture.
As I moved into the 21s century my photographs became less erotic and
more elegant.
After my Rosemary died on 9 December 2020, I became less interested in women and today I can assert that the only woman I am interested is my dead Rosemary. I do not miss the sex. I miss the quiet moments in bed when we held each other or walking around the block holding hands.
All the
above changed even more when last year I read Susan Sontag’s posthumous book
(written in 1975) On Women. She writes that old men have character and old
women are ugly. She does not agree with that. I thank the gods above that my
non-plus-ultra favourite actress, Grace Kelly died young enough that there are
no photographs (you will gag when you see what she looks like now) of her
that will ever appear in deprecatory postings in social media.
In the early 80s the exotic dancers of Vancouver formed a sort of union and they held all kind of activities to raise money. One of them were the exotic car washes. I wrote a blog about it (well no writing) and here it is below. I am now looking at them and wondering how I would have tackled those photographs in this century.
