Films, movies, talking pictures - the cinema and photography have changed our world, as much as they have reflected it. For my grandfather, Bert Fisher, the movies were, in many ways, and for many reasons, some of which have only just come to light (as the photographic image comes to light, floating upwards from its chemical bath in the darkroom) not just something to look forward to on the weekends, but a huge and indeed central part of his life.

This photograph shows the Metro Cinema in Cape Town, which my grandfather managed in the 1960s - for the story behind the photograph, and more about Bert, read on.

Talking pictures is also, of course - snapped from a different angle - what this blog is about: talking about photographs and photography, and sharing my images.

This particular blog post, however, is more about the pictures than words - I have photographs on file, that I would like to share, but not much time in which to craft the words before hip replacement surgery, scheduled for Thursday. And I’m not sure how quickly I’ll be able to get back to taking and making photographs, and writing this blog, so I want to keep this post short, and get it out to you.

(We put our faith, at moments like these, and our lives, in the hands of professionals and experts who have trained and studied and put in the hours, year after year, to be able to do what they do - three cheers for the surgeons and nurses, in my book, and for all those professionals and experts on whose skills and care we rely. Three cheers for knowledge, and facts, and objectivity, and science, and truthfulness, and truth. And three cheers too for humanity and compassion.)

Cherry Beach, and Toronto’s Docklands

As suffering is to art, so is glum and grey weather to photography (ok, so I just made that up). Anyway, we needed to get out of the house, so one day earlier this month we headed across town and down to Cherry Beach, past the docklands, for a bit of a walk - or a walk and a hobble, in my case - along the lakeshore.

When summer is short, as it is here, everyone gets out, regardless of weather, to make the most of the daylight and the warmer temperatures. This day was no different - despite the lowering skies, and a nippy little breeze off the water, people were out and about, just like the good times.

Perhaps it is just me, or just me right now, but there is something melancholy-sweet, seeing people on the beach, under off-colour skies, making the most of it, getting on with their lives, and these few photographs try to capture some of that.

Heading back towards town, we stopped in the docklands, and I hop-hopped out of the car and down to the bridge to take a few more photographs.

Home Songs

There is a drive I always do, when I am in Cape Town - the city of my birth, though there is no plaque to commemorate this - and this is the drive round the mountain, from Newlands or Constantia, over Constantia Nek into Hout Bay, up and over the mountain again and past Llandudno, until suddenly this view comes into sight around the corner - Lions Head and Camps Bay, where I went to school and did what growing up I was able to do on the Atlantic seaboard.

I took my mom with me the last time I visited, in April - it’s a favourite drive of hers, too, saturated and coloured with a million memories - and stopped to take in the mandatory view, before heading on to Camps Bay. From Camps Bay we drove on through Clifton and then down steep Seacliff Road in Bantry Bay, where we had lived when I was a boy in a house whose sea-front boundary was the high-tide mark, past Saunders Rocks, where we would swim and sunbathe, along the Sea Point Beachfront and on past the Green Point lighthouse to Granger Bay.

I used to bring your dad here, my mom said - telling me the story again, as she does every time - when he was old and frail, before he died. He would sit here quietly, gazing out to sea, alone with his thoughts - as we do, and did, over and again.

Here are some photographs I took on the way.

Finding Bert

I’m going to give you the short version here; hopefully a fuller version will follow, or at least some of the missing pieces, when I am back on my feet.

One day, earlier this year - some time before I went back to South Africa, on business - I received an email, out of the blue. And this email asked, was I Bert Fisher’s son? The email was signed ‘Mike Fisher’ - not someone I knew.

Now Bert was my dad’s father, my paternal grandfather - we kids called him Pooch - but he had no family that we knew of, other than his wife, my grandmother and my dad’s mom, who nobody liked and who we seldom saw, and his background was always a bit of a mystery to us. So who was this Mike? I suspected a phishing trip, a con or a fraud, but I was interested enough, and sufficiently curious about the specificity of the question Mike had put, to send him a reply.

No, I said, giving as little away as possible, I was not Bert’s son, I was Bert’s grandson. And Michael wrote back to say, ah, that makes sense. Was your dad’s name Collie?

Now my father’s name was Douglas Bertram Colrich Fisher, but I’d never heard him referred to as Collie before. So I checked with my mom. Dad had been Collie as a child, she said, but when he grew up he called himself Doug.

So I wrote back to Mike and said yes, my dad was Colrich/Doug, and who on earth was he, Michael?

Bert was my uncle he replied - my favourite uncle.

You could have knocked me down with a feather. Mike was Bert’s nephew? Pooch was an uncle? He had brothers or sisters - a family we knew nothing about, had never met, whose existence I for one had never even suspected? Was this for real?

Then came the two photographs I show here - a picture of the Metro Cinema in Cape Town, where Bert had been manager in the 1960s, and a photograph of my grandfather beside the projector in the Broadway Cinema down on the Foreshore, which he had owned. I remembered the Metro, and I remembered the Broadway, and I remembered that projector - I had been allowed, as a boy, into the projection room, and shown how to keep the carbon rods the right distance apart, so that they would arc and create the magic light that would throw the movie images onto the screen, above the audience’s heads.

Bert used to visit us regularly in Johannesburg, Mike said - he was everyone’s favourite uncle. He used to joke with us in fluent Yiddish - he was always laughing and joking. He was a great cartoonist. He gave me my first cameras.

He gave me my first cameras, too, I replied. I remember his cartoons - I used to wish I could draw like him. But Yiddish? Bert was Jewish?

Oh yes replied Mike. We all are. But he married out of the faith.

And siblings? Did Bert have brothers and sisters, I asked, apart from your dad?

Yes, Mike replied, there were brothers, and a sister. His parents came from Poland and Lithuania, his mother via England - Mike thought she and Bert’s father might have met on the boat, on the voyage to South Africa.

Let me leave things there, for now. There’s more to tell - not much, the trail is quite bare - but for this moment, let the pictures talk.

As in a mirror, darkly

One of the (many) things that intrigues me about the story of Bert, and the lost or hidden side of my family - they weren’t, and aren’t, hidden from themselves of course, only from me and my side of the family - is the sense of parallel lives, of histories lost and regained, of secrets and concealment and things said and unsaid, of vanishings and revelations.

It is the same sense, of life as palimpsest, partially glimpsed, that has always intrigued me about shadows and reflections, layerings, multiples.

As in these images, from the Toronto subway, and the Harbord House restaurant on Harbord Street.

Subway Blues

Street Multiples

The Empty Nest

Remember the story about the robins, and the little one who was left behind? Here are two last photographs, taken - I like to think - before it flew away.

Salon 18 at Propellor Art Gallery

Rob and I are chuffed and grateful to have been invited by our artist friend Andres Vosu, a member of Toronto’s Propellor Art Gallery, to show at the Gallery’s Salon 18. Rob will be showing two of her fabulous collages, while I have submitted the three photographs below - printed large (roughly 24 x 16 inches and 18 x 18) by Dimitri at Image Foundry, and beautifully framed by Elgin Picture & Frame.

The Salon will run from 31 July to 18 August, and we hope that as many as possible of our friends will take the time to pop in and take a look around - even better, join us and the other artists on opening night!

Praxis Photo Arts Center

I’ve dialled back a bit recently on submitting photos for gallery exhibitions, partly because of my travels and my work on the EU project - Wot, working again?! Crazy idea!

Still, I am pleased to report that this image, On the Fence, has been selected for The Found Object show at the Praxis Photo Arts Center in Minneapolis. The show will run from 20 July to 10 August.

The photograph was taken on a weekend drive through the Magaliesberg, in April, when I was working in Pretoria - I was cruising idly along in my rented car, enjoying the views and the open road when out of the corner of my eye I caught sight of this carcase strung up on a fence. I was past before I had properly taken in the scene. I pulled off the road as soon as I could, and drove slowly back, until I found it again.

Had the carcase been hung there as a warning, or a display of some kind? Had it been hung there to attract the vultures, and birds of prey? I had no idea. But the image was striking enough, outlandish enough even, to take this photograph.

End Note

All of us have stairs we have to climb in life….