The Spanish Dancer

I was wandering the streets of Gastown waiting for the Gastown Criterium Cycling Race to begin and I sat down on a bench next to this very interesting gentleman.  I said hello and we had a conversation about his life.  The lines in his face told the hints of an interesting story and his words filled in the gaps.  He was a folk singer, who had grown up in Montreal and made a living singing Spanish folk songs and jazz in easter Canada.  One day as he was singing in a dark club in Montreal, the kind that you enter by stairs coming down from the sidewalk, he saw a woman dancing.  She moved through the smokey room with a grace that bewitched him and he felt his voice reach out to meet the beauty of her movement.  She danced, he sang.  He sang, she danced and they seemed to rise to make the other better.  Early that morning he sat down to have a drink with her and 6 months later they had moved out to Vancouver.  “That’s how I got to this bench,” he said.  

“Well, thats a more interesting path than most,” I replied. “Do you mind if I take your portrait?  That dancer is written into the lines of your face.”  He smiled and nodded.

Other parts of my Inspired By Harry Callahan series Jumanji In Vancouver

-Russell Berg

www.seeingberg.com

Life Still Courses

Canon EOS 7D EF-S 17-85 f/4-5.6 at 85mm f/11 1/250 ISO 100 This older lady wandered into view on the Victoria Breakwater and I just had to have a picture of her amazing face.

There is a woman who walks down the pier.  She does so slowly and with a deliberation forced on her by the pain in her joints and the weakness in her knees.  This is not the tragic story of a dancer whose knees gave out on her or a singer who lost it all.  She was not a dancer or a singer, she did not once command the attention of great audiences.  She raised a family, she washed clothes, she made meals and now her body betrays her.  Her husband has been dead many years and even though her step is slow and her heart is many times heavy she still moves with purpose and will.  Life still courses in her veins.  She looks up to see the sails of the boat in the distance fill with wind and snap and surge and she smiles.

I was walking with my daughter on the Victoria Breakwater and on our way back we decided to walk on the quarried stone below instead of on the walkway proper.  It was a beautiful sunny day and there were several scuba divers heading out.  As we were walking I saw an older lady approaching us on the walkway above.  I knew that the concrete was going to be in the frame so I quickly decided to make it a design element, using it to bisect the frame diagonally.  I also had to move quickly because she was going to see me soon and I didn't want her expression to change if she saw me.  Her face had an amazing quality in it with so many wonderful stories in the lines, I wish I could have talked to her.

-Russell Berg