Niño & Niña

Each time a woman lies about her age she becomes an accomplice in her underdevelopment as a human being.

Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society’s double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women and then into obscenely into old women, they can become women much earlier – and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.

1972 – Susan Sontag- On Women – Copyright 2023 by the Estate of Susan Sontag.

 Some beginning to read this might wonder why I am using a phone photograph of my two cats Niño and Niña on our bed with Sontag’s book.

In the late 70s, 80s and in beginning of the 90s I photographed many Vancouver ecdysiasts. I was trusted, so I was even given access into their verboten dressing rooms. A couple of days ago I was interviewed at home by two women who are starting the project of making a documentary on the exotic dancing seen in Vancouver until now. They tape recorded me and plan to return next week with a video camera.

One of the women is the daughter of famous dancer in the late 70s at the Number 5 Orange Bar. She is lovely and intelligent and showed me nude photographs of her mother with a not-in-the-least understated smile.

On a whim I wrote to her and asked her if she would pose for me in the spirit of things. I received a very quick and enthusiastic, “Yes!”

While I am excited about the project, in my career as a magazine, I was constantly pushed by pushy art directors to “do it differently”. While my dancer photographs were mostly portraits and never cheesy, I cannot approach these photographs with a last-century mentality.

This is especially so as I finished Sontag’s book a couple of days ago. Reading it I could not help but compare her liberated woman of 1975 to that of my liberated Rosemary. It was she who made all the decisions in our life together and thanks to her I never have to worry about where the next buck is going to come from.

Will I have to persuade this woman not to take all her clothes off? Because she is inspired by her mother’s former profession, she is keen on imitating the photograph she showed me of her fully nude.

So how am I to combine in a photograph that 80s ecdysiast portrait I so often took, while giving it a modern approach? I know how I am going to start. In the late 70s one of the first dancers I photographed was T. I took my photograph of her reflected in a Mexican 8-sided mirror. I still have that mirror by my entrance.

In the 80s and the 90s some of my friends who were writers, illustrators, editors, designers, strippers, poets, etc. would meet for lunch every Thursday at Vancouver’s then fabulous Railway Club for lunch at noon. One very lively and pleasant young woman was Kimberly Klass. She seemed to be innocent and proved it with enthusiasm when she visited me one afternoon and I played her some of my favourite jazz. She had never heard it.

Somehow I got to photograph her many times. She was more than a muse as she made me (without saying anything) push the boundary of what I usually did. The photograph of her with her black skirt, stockings and hand is one of my most favourite ever.

One day she called me to tell me that she had a new friend who was a painter/artist. I immediately told her to bring him to my studio and for him to bring a little paintbrush.

At the end of the 20^th century and in the beginning of this one there was a photographic gallery called The Exposure Gallery on Beatty Street. They kept having group shows with themes. A frequent one was The Erotic.

Somehow I managed to photograph two women, Kimberly was one of them in which I had a procedure which involved me pointing my camera at their faces while below they indulged in a self-induced orgasm. Then from the contact sheet I would pick five and run them in a long matted frame which I called a narrative. It was up to me to figure out (and as I was a man that was next to impossible) to find that third frame that marked the orgasm.

I will never understand women. At the opening about five of my women friends came up to me and asked, “Alex, why did you not ask me?”

This positive blog now goes in the opposite direction as some years ago Kimberly committed suicide. While we were friends she never ever told me about what might have led her to do that.

I am placing her beautiful photographs here in her memory.

Sursum corda.

My friend Ian McGuffie constantly tells me that we won the cosmic lottery because we were born in that last century.

Not too long ago I was fired from a photography school in Vancouver as I told my students that if they wanted to be photographers they should have a Plan B (plumbing) and a Plan C (electricity). Because I am an old man I am trying to throw stuff. Today I found an envelopes with these promo post card sized cards. The date is 2006. By then the writing was on the wall as magazines and newspapers began to fade and the concept of accepting photographs provided to them started the end of assigned jobs.

I had these card printed very well by Metropolitan Design Printers and my photographs were drum-scanned by Grant Simmons/DISC. These were my last ever hard copy promotion that began many years before with all sorts of portfolios including some that were called tear-sheet. All of these portfolios are, one on top of another in my oficina. I cannot make myself throw them away.

Back in that cosmic lottery I made yearly trip to Toronto to show those portfolios to magazine are directors.

Of these four promo cards I can state that they all now involve some bad news. Arthur Erickson is dead, the lovely model Lisa married a plastic surgeon in LA and he ruined her body. As for my two granddaughters (28 and 22) this century has eliminated the importance of grandparents. I am an old man.

Euphorbia pulcherrima - 5 March 2026

In what is a yearly tradition, my friend Tim Turner who is a real estate agent who sold our Kerrisdale house and found our home in Kitsilano, brings me a large poinsettia every year. It is now in its last legs. As I was about to take it to the green bin I noticed the leaves. Noticing small stuff is something I learned from my Rosemary. In our garden my large hostas competed with some of her tiny perennials.

Because I cannot escape connecting everything in my house to my memory of Rosemary I decided to scan these lovely leaves. She would have smiled at my effort.

Quite often in these blogs I quote my grandmother who would often tell me that when the devil was bored he swatted flies with his tail.

It is next to impossible for me to explain that taking care of two cats, performing the household menialities and having no obligations produces enajenamiento. This Spanish word sounds a lot better to me than the English equivalent existential angst.

I have no financial worries, I am more or less healthy and every day when I am not thinking of my dear departed Rosemary It seems I am just waiting for something to happen. What that is is most obvious.

And so I sit at my chair by my computer and swat photographic flies with my computer and film files.

Two days ago I wrote here about my Ektachromes with Lisa who now lives in Seattle. The pictures I looked at today I shot in 1986. I am again most interested in these photographs as I did not light them. In fact a cliché of clichés is that I photographed her with reflections on her body from her curtain blinds. I often think that clichés are indeed that simply because the work.

Ektachrome Blues 

Today my fly swatting involved putting one negative on top of the other on my scanner. I call these scanner negative sandwiches.

I remember some years ago that I had a chat with a beautiful woman in a café and I asked her if she would pose for me. She said, “I don’t do boudoir.” I was insulted as I believe that my photographs, and particularly these are not that.

Now at my age of 83 I would no longer pursue taking photographs like these. The photographs I took in 1986 of Lisa showed lots of nipples. I would never place them here.

Now when I think of my Rosemary, while bed rotting with my two cats, I do not think of sex or anything erotic. I think of getting close to her and smelling her behind her ear and enjoying the warmth of her body.

Bed rotting this morning with Niña on top of me I looked at Rosemary’s framed photograph on the wall and thought, “The three of us are together.”