Sunday, April 28, 2019

Jonathan Lemieux. Photography by Paul Specht




I've already featured a self-portrait of Jonathan from earlier in the year here: JL  He came to my attention years ago with an art book called Morning Faces.

Mood lighting


Monday, April 22, 2019

Ramón 25

These two men were not lovers. They might not even have been friends.

They could be two co-workers who barely knew each other and were put together by the law firm they worked for to record the 'gaiety' of some European festival.  Who knows?

There is an old saying, "The past is another country".  It is very apt and completely true.  Before the Royal Ontario Museum was renovated some years ago, I used to love going to the European history section.  You could sit in a booth with a large diorama or poster size picture in front of you and press a button.  It was very intimate, just enough room for two.  There was a recorded narration.  My favourite showed the progress of Louis 14th in some French arcadia, clearly marked as royally dressed.  He was sitting on his horse with soldiers and courtiers and the general population gathered around him.  The narration went on to state that any of the general population portrayed in the picture probably smelled pretty bad because bathing was uncommon.  It continued by saying that the king was at least equal to his subjects in this respect.  Rank body odour was something they shared, because it was thought at that time that unwashed skin was the best protection against disease.  The skin was believed to be a very fragile organ and scant protection on its own against all the maladies that made life so short hundreds of years ago.  So nobody washed, and everybody, including the Sun King, stank.

Modern germ theory has thankfully delivered us from the age of snuff and nosegays.  But then, this is just my point, as we seem to live so completely within our time that it is like we are caught in some kind of temporal web.  Many of us can't see what's beyond us, or behind us.  The observable universe only reaches as far as the light can penetrate.

I know I am guilty of living in the past, but I am quite happy there.  It is very orderly and predictable.  All the players know their marks and step on them exactly as they should, time and time again.  It is a terrible sin of mine to take refuge there, like Sookie Stackhouse in True Blood when she flashes herself, and those she wants to protect, to Fairyland.  But I know this place.  It is not today, neither was it enlightened.  These men had no clubs to go to in order to drink and kiss passionately, right at the bar.  They didn't meet on Grindr.  The word homosexual had probably, for them, only recently been coined.  And it wasn't discussed.

No, these men were not lovers.  They might not even have been friends.

Sunday, April 21, 2019