¿Una Chiripada?
Saturday, September 05, 2026
Una
chiripada (derivado de la palabra chiripa) es un golpe de suerte, una
casualidad favorable o un acierto inesperado conseguido sin planearlo.
A chiripada (derived from the word chiripa) is a stroke of
good luck, a favourable chance or an unexpected success obtained unplanned.
Not new in my blogs is an often repeated fact that the
photographer that I am today (a good one I believe) has to do not only with all
the pushy art directors that made me do stuff I did not want to do (but
invariably they were right) are two persons. One was my wife Rosemary and the
other Jeff Gin who worked at Leo’s Camera and is now the manager of Kerrisdale
Cameras on Lonsdale in North Vancouver.
It was Rosemary who on August 16, 2013 told me, “Alex you
cannot keep bribing airport security in Buenos Aires and Mexico City not
to X-Ray your film. Buy a digital
camera now.” This I did with Jeff Gin at Leo’s who sold me a Fuji X-E1 and a
few years later I added an X-E3.
If I am able to use jpgs instead or RAW, it is because I
expose correctly. I am able to have correct colour with my digital photographs
as well with my scanned colour negatives and slides again because of Rosemary.
One Sunday many years ago around 1980 Rosemary said, “Alex you have been
complaining about not being able to print colour negatives in the darkroom. As
of tomorrow I have signed you up in a course at colour printing at Ampro Photo
Workshops on Broadway. Key to colour correcting is the awareness of that tricky
colour that is cyan and that many times
when photographs look yellowish it is not that they are too yellow but a
bit green, too.
On 30 November 2023 I attended a free Fuji Film workshop
organized by Jeff Gin. Its purpose was the introduction of a new version of the
Fuji GfX. They made available a little studio and two models. One was a male
the other was a woman. That is how I met the wonderful Hannah Parkhouse.
I took two photographs with my Fuji X-E3 and lucked out (una
chiripada in Mexican Spanish). Then she came to my small home studio. Because I
now have a 28 inch wide Acer monitor I have seen many good photographs of
Hannah Parkhouse that I missed.
The question is if I lucked out or I knew what I was doing.
I believe that it is the latter. I am 84 and I began to take photographs and
portraits in 1959. Am I right?
Mother Earth Revisited
Friday, September 04, 2026
Mother Earth bites the dust
Mothers Earth and Grammatical Gender
A Flooded Darkroom
Many years
ago I participated in a open gallery theme in Alberta called Mother Earth.
It is my
belief that the photographs of plants or flowers in conjunction with beautiful
women never work. But I did in this occasion I combined a Clematis montana with the just right chest of a friend called
Katheryn.
Today while
fidgeting in my oficina, I took out Katheryn’s extensive files. One envelope
was called Mother Earth. In it I found two very close negatives from which I
had chosen one for the Alberta show.
In my past I
have twice used a technique of lighting the edges of a slide with a match. I
could not find any matches so I used my barbecue gas lighter. I like the
results. I could now call this a Mother Earth of the 21st century
full of scorching heat.
The burned
negative is far from flat. It would be difficult to put it into a traditional
darkroom enlarger negative holder. My Epson V700 handles the three-dimensional
negative without any problem. Somehow it adds that sharp cool colour on the
edges.
Again I want
to state that combining the technology of that past century, a b+w 6x7cm
negative with a scanner (actually also from that other century) the results can
be quite interesting.
When I would
tell my abuelita that I was bored she would tell me, “Alex, chúpate el codo” –
“Alex suck your elbow.” I did just that in my oficina today.
My Heart is Laden
Thursday, September 03, 2026
 |
| Rosa 'A Shropshire Lad'' & Peter Trower - 3 September 2026 |
With Rue My
Heart is Laden – A Shropshire Lad - A.E. Housman With rue my heart is laden
For golden
friends I had,
For many a
rose-lipt maiden
And many a
lightfoot lad.
By brooks too
broad for leaping
The lightfoot
boys are laid;
The rose-lipt
girls are sleeping
In fields
where roses fade.
In the 80s and early 90s a group of us (writers,
editors, photographers, artists, poets,
strippers, novelists, etc) would meet for lunch at the Railway Club every
Thursday. Such was for me the importance of this gathering that I tried to avoid
accepting free-lance jobs that would interfere.
We had four poets that often attended; they were Peter
Trower, Gerry Gilbert, Evelyn Lau and Jamie Reid. Reid affirmed he was a member
of the Canadian Communist Party.
Peter Trower was often called our Logging Poet. It was
he who introduced me to A.E. Housman and particularly his A Shropshire Lad.
In my rose garden in today’s date, 3 September, 2026
only one rose is in bloom. It is in my back lane garden. It is an English Rose,
thus it is remontant. This means that it blooms more than once. In many respects
it is one of two or three of my best roses. It is fragrant and one of its lovely
characteristics is that its new leaves are bright dark red.
My Gioconda
Wednesday, September 02, 2026
 |
| Rosemary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward |
In the July 6-13 The
New Yorker I read an essay Regression to the Mein – How Mirrors, selfies,
and surveillance what we make of our faces by Cal Reverly-Calder.
This paragraph caught my eye:
Only with the Renaissance would it break again, with
the fifteenth-cenutury blossoming of the naturalistic portrait: van Eyck,
Campin, Piero della Francesca. The archetype of painted interiority may still
be the good old “Mona Lisaa,” known in Italian as “La Gioconda”- the face that
launched a thousand conjectures. Bound –Alberti brings her in dutifully, to say
how “enigmatic” her smile is, though Wigginstein, again, made more of the
cliché. “When we speak of the enigmatic smile of the Mona Lisa, that may well
mean that we ask ourselves: In what situation, in what story, might one smile
like that?” To talk of stories, he means, is to talk of time; you need the
before and the after, the rounded sense of life. After all, some people laugh
in anger and weep with joy. If I read your smile, as happiness, I’m drawing on
a fluid sense of the character I know, and on our place in an emotional
culture. One reason Leonardo’s painting has endured in the popular imagination
is straightforward: we want to ask questions of her – how she feels, what she’s
thinking – and though we don’t believe she’s alive anymore that we believe
Hamlet or James Bond to be alive, we can’t help responding to her face as if
she were.
My Gioconda will always be my Gioconda. One of the
images of the four here (the one on the right) stares at me enigmatically from
the framed photograph on the opposite wall from my bed. She stares at me and
keeps on when I put out the lights.
I never did ask her why she often had those sad eyes
when she posed for my camera. I had plenty of time to do so as I took these
photographs (she was nude, they were my first nudes) in Mexico City sometime in
1969.
Nobody will know why the Mona Lisa smiled and I will
never know of her sad eyes.
These photographs are the result of putting a strip of
two pictures on top of the other and then I scanned them with my Epson V700. I then joined them by using Photoshop layers.
No AI.
Chick Snipper & Slab
Tuesday, September 01, 2026
 |
| Chick Snipper & Tara Cheyenne Freidenberg |
When
journalism was alive and well in Vancouver in that last century and in a bit of
this one I was present to photograph many activities and people in this city. In
many respects I may be one of the last witnesses now that I am 84.
Social media
is full of people acknowledging the death on August 25 of choreographer Chick
Snipper. I looked in my dance files and I did not find her. I put her name into
Google and was rewarded with a photograph I took for the Georgia Straight of
Snipper with dancer Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg.
I distinctly
remember having gone to see Snipper’s Slab in February 2003. In my files I had
had Slab. It seems that I never wrote a blog about it as I did not begin my
blog until 2006.
I am now happy to place here my witnessing of Slab. At the time, it was a shocking
performance for Vancouver as the three dancers did not wear anything. It was
all there to see it. Somehow I managed to take 9 photographs were nothing is
showing to offend those keen on community standards.
I looked at
the photographs again and suddenly I noticed that they were all taken with my unwieldy and
heavy medium format Mamiya RB-67. I also noticed the tile floor of my studio.
Conclusion? The dancers came to my studio, I lit them and they posed sans
private parts.
Not Artificial Intelligence
Monday, August 31, 2026
 |
| Kira - 25 January 2024 |
Artificial Intelligence in Photography - My Take
When I
combine the photographic technology of the last century with this one’s I find
that the results can be cutting edge (does anybody use that expression
anymore?). I have no patience for artificial intelligence and at my age of 84,
happily I will not be around when it takes over the world.I believe
that when Photoshop came into being in February 19, 1990 and a penguin could be
placed in the Sahara Desert that was the dawn of AI. At that time only a
Polaroid print could be trusted as being an authentic reproduction of
something.
I do
interesting effects with my Epson V700 scanner with the sandwiching of two or
more negatives or slides. I call them “scanner negative sandwiches without mayonnaise”
 |
| Negative sandwich of Timothy and Tim Turner - twins |
The advent
of my use of digital cameras (a Fuji X-E1 and X-E3) has brought the instant
look and possibility of using slow shutters. This works beautifully with dance
and, so I have discovered, in my studio. Some of my first experiments involved
an ex student from Vanarts (I taught there at one time) who more recently posed
for me in my little Kitsilano studio.
 |
| Béatrice Larrivée |
The smallish
room has a grey wall where I like to position my subjects. On the opposite wall
I have a large Ikea mirror. I like to take my photographs by pointing my camera
at the mirror. In this way I appear in the photograph. I call this shaving the
barber myself.
The idea
that a Polaroid (and now I have many
boxes of Fuji Instant Film which I call Fujiroid) I find that while I can
manipulate the peels the results are not AI.
Before the appearance of the scanner we photographers who used Polaroids (in my case with my medium format Mamiya RB-67) we would throw the peels away. Once we realized we could scan them, the results were marvelous. More recently I discovered that if I placed the peel face down on my kitchen marble top I could bleach the black backing and magically I would have a negative. I then scan the negative and reverse it in Photoshop. Above is the result of scanned and reversed Fujiroid peel.
Why use AI? Not me!
Four Books & One More
Sunday, August 30, 2026
 |
| The books in my guest bathroom |
First Paragraphs
George Bowering - The Great Contrarian
I have a
guest bathroom on the ground floor not far from the kitchen. In it proudly
display four books. They are one on top of the other. All four have influenced
my life for the better. I will put links below to what I have written about
them.
But most
important is the first paragraph of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. I think it is the most famous first paragraph of any
book from that 20th century.
The sky
above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
Jane Rule’s first
paragraph (part of it):
Writing an
autobiography may be a positive way of taking my own life.
George
Bowering – Canada’s first Poet Laureate writes on the opposite side of my
portrait of him:
Look at the photograph. Look at the
man in the photograph. Well there isn’t one. You are looking at a small
two-dimensional something.
Harold Bloom
in his book halfway through his photograph:
We read not only because we cannot
know enough people, but because friendship is so vulnerable, so likely to
diminish or disappear, overcome by space, time, imperfect sympathies, and all
the sorrows of familial and passional life.
That Bloom
paragraph defines my situation since my Rosemary died 6 years ago. I feel my
family has fragmented and so many of my friends are now dead as I am 84.
On a more
positive bent, last week I went to eat at Nando’s on 41st(opposite
Kerrisdale Cameras) with my daughter. I passed by Hager books and found this Ian
Rankin pocket book that in many ways defines my present life. His Inspecter
Rebus has retired and is no longer a policeman. He is depressed.
A positive
bent? Yes! I been unable to read any books of late. I just stare at the ceiling
with my female cat Niña by my side and I seem to turn off the lights earlier
every evening. Not any more as I am reading at least one chapter of Rankin’s
novel. Today I passed by Hager books and found another Rebus novel.
Yes books
can have a powerful influence.
