29 January 2026

 Pleasure in Failure

Today 29 January 2026 I managed to inform the Telus people by talking to a pleasant man from Guatemala that I had a new credit card to replace the one that is inspiring February 1st. I managed to pay (in person) my house insurance. After that I came home and settled on the bed with my two cats. I stared at the ceiling and did some thinking.

That thinking involves my inability to accept after Rosemary’s death on 9 December 2020 that she is not with me occupying her side of the bed. Everything in the house, the dishware, the pictures on the wall, what we bought when we were in Mexico all associate my thoughts with her. When Niña and Niña stare at me I immediately remember how she cuddled them. They connect me to her.

It would seem that my association and grief is not going to fade. This is why I decided to scan these hosta leaves on which I had placed a b+w transparency of Rosemary with Alexandra between glass and exposed it all to summer sun for 4 hours. I learned this from my friend Ralph Rinke. He did warn me that the result of UV light reacting with chlorophyll was not a permanent. I immediately scanned the results, printed them and then framed them with UV protection glass.

I saw these faded hosta leaves. The action of scanning them and seeing them as they are I believe prepares me for my eventual (soon perhaps) fading from this world where I will then join Rosemary in oblivion. Both she and I knew we would never see each other again.

Inanimate objects do not have free will. Only humans and animals have it. I don’t quite agree. A few months ago in a shoot in my piano room my Fuji X-E3 refused to take pictures. It would not click. I then read a notice that said, “Need to pair with your phone.” To me that proves that these inanimate objects (many are my cameras) go their own way because they can.

Where does the weird free-will come from? The major reason is that the people that design these digital cameras, computers, scanners, etc never have to use them.

When I have problems opening bottles or packages I often think, “The chap that designed this should be subjected to opening them for a whole day.”

In my past life as a magazine photographer I was aware of Patterson’s Law. Patterson said that Murphy was an optimist. This meant that for all my assignments I took two of everything.

This past few weeks I had three film cameras with film. One of them was loaded with colour negative film. When I had the rolls processed by The Lab one of the rolls of Kodak Plus-X which was exposed to X-ray when I went to Mexico City on this past December had a strip of odd pictures. One of them is the one you see here. I have no idea what it is or when I shot it.

But I like it. Perhaps Patterson and Murphy combined forces to make me smile.

Hannah Parkhouse -25 January 2025

Even though I am a man of the 20th century I am aware of some of the many pleasant surprises of this century. One of them involves combining the photographic technology of that past century with this one.

I shoot film and do digital with my Fuji X-E1 and X-E3 cameras. I have a very good Epson P700 inkjet printer and an excellent Epson V700 scanner. This means that I can scan the negatives and slides of that other century (and the ones I shoot now) with that scanner. One of my techniques is what I call “Scanner negative sandwiches without mayonnaise”. I place one negative over the other (best when from the same session) and the results mimic (better in my opinion) what some photographers do with Photoshop Layers. I like the mechanical method of mine.

A recent experiment involves me scanning colour negatives with b+w negatives together. The main photograph in this blog involves a further variation. I scanned the colour negative and b+w negative of Sarah Parkhouse (took the pictures this past Sunday) as positives. Once scanned, I reversed them in my 22 year-old Photoshop 8.  The other pictures here are of treating the sandwiches as the negatives that they are.

Hannah Parkhouse 2023 - Fuji X-E3

As one waits for that inevitability (one not thought of when I was young) I want to put some sort of order to what is left of my life. There is a story written by Alejo Carpentier, the Cuban poet and writer who coined the expression “lo real maravilloso” or magic realism that comes to mind often. It is called Viaje a la semilla or Journey Back to the Source in which someone watching a funeral ceremony from the outside notices that the lit candles are getting longer and a ship disintegrates as the wood it is made of goes back to the trees and the nails to the iron ore in the ground.

Journey Back to the Source 

Today Sunday I had the presence of my model friend Hannah Parkhouse. She is only 26 but she wrote to me that she was beginning to feel her age and wanted me to take some photographs. Because I am 83 I can state that the only woman I am interested is Rosemary who died five years ago. The idea of erotic photography is far from my mind. I decided I wanted to photograph that essence of her that makes her a woman. To me it is and was the intelligent expression of her looking into my camera.

In 1962 while living in Mexico City I had only one camera which was a Pentacon-F SLR I had purchased while in Austin, Texas in 1958. I told myself I needed another camera and one that would have the same lens mount as the Pentacon’s. At a used camera store called Foto Rudiger on Avenida Carranza Street I found a used Asahi Pentax S-3. It was black and it showed the brass behind the black paint.

I used this camera on December 1 of last year to photograph Mexico City photographer Pedro Meyer. I wrote about that here. Pedro Meyer

For those photographs I used a portable studio light, a softbox and the original 55mm f-2 lens.

With that recent photographic even I decided that I would photograph Hannah even more reflecting my past roots in Mexico around 1962 when I had no flash. I loaded the 3 camers, 2 with b+w 100 ISO film and the third, the Canon Pellix given to me by my architect Abraham Rogatnick, with 800 ISO Kodak colour negative film.

Another decision was that I would photograph Hannah in my house and not in my studio and with no flash. I eliminated the use of a tripod and shot wide open. Some of the pictures will not be that sharp.

When asked about the difference between film and digital I always answer, “Uncertainty”.

There is a beauty to that anticipation. I will find out on Monday at 4:30 when I will pick up the film at The Lab.

A hard-to-describe to folks who shoot digital is the pleasure of going into my car with the negatives and holding them by the windshield to see the results.

 A Borgesian First Time

Rosemary’s portrait stares at me from my place in bed. When I turn off the lights I can imagine her gaze still there.

When we went to get Niño and Niña 7 years ago at the SPCA, Niña became her cat. Niña ignored me or ran away. Now with Rosemary dead five years Niña is constantly on me. She has transferred from Rosemary to me.

The presence of my two cats helps me keep sane. That presence, gives me a purpose in a life that has lost most of it. I believe that I will be more useful to my small family when I am dead. But it is Niño, who has lymphatic cancer of the intestines, and when he stares at me, I know what he is thinking. “Alex don’t die before we do. Who would take care of us if you did?”

While Niño communicates without talking, that does not stop me from talking to both cats. This I do all the time, particularly when I return home from shopping at Safeway.

I live alone but I talk a lot. In the car, without thinking, I find myself saying out loud, “Rosemary, the quiero,” or I simply repeat her name especially in Spanish, “Rosamaría.”

With my two cats next to me on the bed and with Rosemary in her framed portrait on the wall I feel that we are four in the room.

Magically, as I stare at her and she stares at me back I am back 57 years with my Asahi Pentax S-3 and Kodak Tri-X, taking her portrait. Why did she have that sad look? Did she know or even think then that one day we would not be together?