I returned this past Monday from Alberta where I conducted a weekend workshop for my friends Peter and Julian at The Camera Store. The workshop was held in a classroom in Calgary and on a ranch about an hour’s drive south of Calgary.

We had 15 students and were absolutely blessed with five individuals who gave us their time as models with no more compensation than some pictures. Rosemary, Tom, and Joe were the adults, Matt and Kate, Rosemary and Tom’s granddaughters, 10 and 6, rounded out the group.  Nothing takes the place of the real thing when you’re looking to photograph people from a certain kind of country, who live a certain kind of life style, and our five subjects couldn’t have been better. They all rode in to meet us from their neighboring ranches and tirelessly gave us a full morning of their time. They rode good horses of a variety of colors. One paint, not a flashy horse, named Apache, had been used by actor Robert Duvall when he was filming in the area in recent years.

The attendees all made some fine pictures. One of them, George Barr, a physician and an accomplished photographer (I had to wonder why he was taking my workshop) normally does rather well studied and graphic images. He did slip in a PhotoShop manipulation on me but admitted to the horror of such a thing. Actually, those are my words, not his. But in my workshops one is not allowed such an utterance as “Oh, you can fix that in PhotoShop.” And you certainly can’t “drop in” someone from one picture into another.  I don’t teach fixing, I try to work on seeing.

Anyway, it was an enjoyable experience. I was in Calgary briefly last year to do an evening presentation for The Camera Store. Calgary has changed so very much since I was first up there in the early 1970’s working the rodeo. There’s been lots of change since I was last there to photograph, also for the rodeo, in 1978. Calgary is enjoying (I guess that’s the proper term) a major oil boom and it seems everywhere one looks one sees skyscrapers rising, lots of glass and gleaming steel.

For those of you who don’t know Calgary but find yourselves in that town, if you are a photographer you MUST stop in to visit The Camera Store. It’s probably my favorite camera store anywhere, and that certainly includes New York City. A lack of attitude, or perhaps a really good attitude, is what truly seems to define the difference between The Camera Store and most big city shops. The place is full of people looking to help you with what ever your needs might be. The inventory is big, they seem to have every major and minor camera maker, lights, accessories of all kinds, and lots of really good photographic books. All in all, it’s a real treat. One walks in and feels good, at least if one is a photographer.  Cstomers and store attendants are seen talking as if they’re old friends and in many cases it seems to be true.

Speaking of stores and cameras, this is the time of rumors regarding what marvels are about to be announced, what new and improved models are destined to be on the market. I’m sure they’ll be some wonderful things revealed.  I don’t know if I’ll be trying any of them, we’ll see. I still think basically, a camera is a camera, is a camera. It’s the eye that has to improve and sometimes that’s a lot harder to do. I’m working on it, sometimes with more success than at other times.

MIISSOULA IN JUNE

Another two months have almost passed since I last posted on my blog. For whatever reason, that seems to be my pattern.

I left Virginia May 25 and after stops to see family and friends in Minnesota and Iowa, I arrived in Missoula the afternoon of June 6, the earliest I’ve yet been able to get back to our little house up in the south hills of town. I wanted to get here earlier this year because I can’t stay through September and the glorious month of October as we usually do. I have to be back in India by the last week in September.

The first week back always seems spent reorganizing the house and touching base with friends. Since then I’ve been writing a lot, but for my novel, not my blog. And the last few days have been spent hanging my exhibit, “TWENTY-THREE RANDOM MOMENTS, 1964-2002, that will open at The Darkroom Gallery on Higgins Avenue in downtown Missoula, July 6 and run through the month. It’s a collection of mostly 13” x 19” prints drawn from work done in the United States, Canada, Peru, France, and Italy. So if you happen to be swinging through Missoula between 5:00 and 8:00 next Friday, stop in and have a beer with us.

Back in Virginia we got lucky and were not hit badly by Friday’s severe storm. Additional rough weather may come in this period of extremely hot and humid days often accompanied by storms with strong winds. Ani and Anthony were out of power at the house for Friday night and all day and night Saturday but there are no big trees down. Of course, these Virginia home emergencies always seem to happen when I’m not there. At least I’m not in India but I might just as well be as far as helping and assuring Ani that we didn’t fare badly compared to a lot of others. Terri told me this morning that a lot of the roads between Charlottesville and where they live in Batesville looked like “a war zone.” I’m not sure when it’s supposed to get better, at least cool down some. Out here in western Montana it’s getting hot and dry and it might get windy, too, and if we don’t get some serious rain soon we may be facing up to a fire season that has already hit hard across the divide in parts of eastern Montana.

I attended a wonderful event Thursday evening at Fact & Fiction bookstore in Missoula. Novelist William Hjortsberg gave an entertaining reading of his new book, Jubilee Hitchhiker, the life and times of Richard Brautigan, which weighs in at about 2 ½ pounds but I suspect I’m going to get more than my money’s worth ounce per ounce from this biography of the poet, novelist, and short story writer who in the 1960s and 70s became famous for his work and his often alcohol fueled erratic behavior. He also became for a while, rich.

Hjortsberg, who lives in Livingston, Montana, and was a long time friend of Brautigan and for a time his neighbor in Montana, related anecdotes, many quite humorous, about Brautigan and his quirks. He avoided the book’s dark, initial chapter which in the first two sentences reveals Brautigan’s September, 1984, decision to take his life in the living room of his house in Bolinas, California by firing a .44 Magnum hollow point bullet that blew off the top of his head. It turns out the weapon used was a nickel-plated Smith and Wesson model 28 revolver on temporary loan to Brautigan. The first chapter goes on to describe in detail the gruesome reality of what remained of Brautigan when his body was finally discovered after decomposing for more than a month. It also touches on the initial response of many of Brautigan’s friends and his publisher upon hearing of the death of someone many may had considered difficult but also a kind of genius for connecting with his times.

Brautigan was 49 years-old when he died. But by the time of that devastating pull of the trigger he had lost much of the popularity he once so enjoyed in his native country. He departed without giving any notice in the way of an explanation note. Novelist and Brautigan friend, Thomas McGuane was quoted as saying of Brautigan: “When the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bath water.” And: “He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy.”

Like many of my generation I recall enjoying Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General from Big Sur, and In Watermelon Sugar in the late 1960’s. Those paperbacks, some quite slim, are somewhere in my library back in Virginia and I wish I had them with me now to reread along with Hjortsberg’s book..

I met Hjorsberg briefly after the reading and again that night at the Depot bar where he and some of my Missoula writer friends and I had gathered for drinks and food. It struck me that night how fortunate I’ve been over the years to have enjoyed the work and friendship of some fine writers who either live now or have lived in Montana and how three of them have contributed forwards to three of my six books.

In the winter of 1980 I drove to Thomas McGuane’s place in Paradise Valley–not far from Livingston, along with my writer friend Steve Byers, who knew McGuane and introduced me to him–so I could ask if McGuane would consider writing a forward to my first book, Vanishing Breed, a collection of my photographs and writings about the American west and the cowboy to be published by New York Graphic Society/Little Brown Co. I projected for McGuane a tray of transparencies I wanted to include. Before the night was over Tom said he’d be pleased to write the forward for me.

Twenty years later novelist Richard Ford wrote the forward to my book Portraits of America. I remember meeting with Richard once to talk about the book in the coffee shop of a motel in Chinook, Montana, a town up on the Hi-Line where Ford then had a place where he could write and get in some bird hunting.

And two years ago– writer William Kittredge, who succeeded poet Richard Hugo as the head of the creative writing department at the University of Montana, and guided it for many years– wrote the forward to my most recent book, WILLIAM ALBERT ALLARD: Five Decades.

I have seen McGuane rarely over the years and about the same for Richard Ford although I recall a rather bizarre pheasant hunting trip in central Montana a couple of year ago; a planned meeting with Ford and two of his friends from Missoula. All of us brought dogs but my Buster was the only dog that came back without needing the attention of a vet, and the silly part is we never really did get out to hunt. It’s a long story.

But Bill Kittredge and his lovely long-time companion, writer Annick Smith, have become two of my really good friends here. I see Bill just about every week if he’s in town. Bill has been gracious enough to read chapters of my book as I progress and has been encouraging. Other writers I enjoy reading and seeing here in ZooTown, such as Judy Blunt, Dee McNamer and Bryan Di Salvatore, are all on the creative writing faculty at the University of Montana.  Novelist David Gates arrived on the faculty last fall and I enjoyed some time with him at readings. And writers Robert Stublefield and Debra Magpie Earling, also on the creative writing faculty, have become very good friends I look forward to seeing and talking to during my days here.

There are many reasons why I love Montana and Missoula. The community of fine writers in the state and in this town in particular, is a big reason and I think it always will be. I hadn’t actually lived in a town for many years before we made our part-time move to Missoula five years ago.  For more than half my life I had chosen rural settings in which to live, places where I couldn’t see my nearest neighbor, which pretty much describes our place on the side of a mountain in Virginia.  So here I am–neighbors all around me–and I’m loving it because it’s Missoula.  I do wish I’d made the move to Montana much earlier but then that might seem like I’m complaining which would be far from true. I feel very much at home here and one can’t ask for more than that and it’s to be appreciated, not soured by regret that it didn’t happen sooner.

It looks like it’ll be a hot Fourth of July and with the coming of dark the night sky will erupt with many loud, light displays. They’re big on fireworks here. In past years I’ve tried to sit on the little deck off our living room where it’s possible to view rockets and pinwheels bursting in the sky in four or five different areas of town, But each year when things start to go boom, Buster has run in a frenzy up and down the steps, circling the yard and barking endlessly into the night. Lizzy the Terrorist is less vocal but none the less on alert, should her fifteen pounds of aggressiveness be needed.  This year I’m invited for a Forth of July dinner at a nice restaurant on the edge of town and I imagine  we’ll witness the pyrotechnics after desert.  But I’m sure the dazzling, blasting, and ground shaking fireworks detonated Wednesday night will drive Buster crazy if I leave he and Lizzy out in the fenced back yard by themselves. So I’d better put them in my writing room with the door closed.

That’s Wednesday, of course. Keep Friday the 6th in mind if you’re in Missoula. It’s a First Friday and there will be the usual art walk with the town’s galleries showing new work. My show opens downtown at the Darkroom Gallery on Higgins Avenue, 5:00 to 8:00.  Come on by, drink a beer, look at the pictures, and say hello.

Beryle Mayfield, a good friend of mine, and I recently made a swap. Beyrle gave me the majority of his record collection, hundreds of LPs, many in excellent condition both in terms of the cover art and the vinyl records. His taste being quite eclectic, the artists range from Glenn Gould playing the Bach-Goldberg Variations to the best of Art Taum, Charlie Parker, Sonny Rollins, and many jazz greats, on through 60s-70s rock and roll and I’ve even spotted a Hank Snow album while thumbing through the many wine boxes packed with LPs.

Hank Snow?

I photographed him in his dressing room at the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville once back in the 1970s. Some Hank Williams records are in those boxes too, but he’s in a more revered class than Hank Snow. Now I’m looking for wooden crates to store them in and the possibility of thinning out some of our many bookshelves—dedicated readers, Ani and I have books in every room in this house—in order to make room for my suddenly greatly increased record library. I’ll probably never again have to check out another yard sale looking for record treasures, although I probably will. It’s hard not to.

The other day I pulled out from one of the boxes a 1973 recording of Jean-Luc Ponty and Stephane Grappelli and it reminded me of how much I miss my late brother Bruce’s music. Bruce was a wonderful violinist and a fine trumpet and flugelhorn player. He became enamored with Conn cornets from the 1930s late in his life. He was a smooth jazz player on both horn and fiddle, not someone very much caught up in bebop style. He got his professional musician’s union card at age 13 or 14. As a young man he played for about 15 years in the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, leaving it to become a freelance violin and horn player, doing a tremendous amount of studio work in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area in the years before that business got digitized and the calls became few and far between. Bruce had a beautiful tone on his violin and could make the instrument sing. He never recorded himself with the exception of a few takes he made as demo CDs to use in booking his various ensembles. I have one of those CDs in my car and I play it frequently. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2008 at the relatively young age of 64.

If you’re wondering what Beryle got from me in trade, it was a couple of prints from my now and then work in Paris. Beryle knows and loves Paris far better and even more deeply than do I. Compared to him I’m a novice regarding that city. Beryle was actually with me one summer afternoon in 2002 when I made one of the pictures I gave him, a 13” x 19” print of a picture I made looking out on some terrace tables in front of what was then one of our favorite wine bars on Rue de Rivoli. He and I almost got caught in an unexpected and tremendous downpour but managed to duck in the doorway of La Tartine. As it poured rain the sun came out brilliantly and the light was champagne colored for just a few moments and I was thinking, this won’t last long, Allard, please don’t miss this. I think just one frame of the few I made with my M6 was successful. But that’s all you need, really. Having more just makes the editing more difficult, doesn’t it?

The other print I gave Beryle is a small one, the picture I call Towering Over Bardot, Paris, 1988, made in the apartment an American model named Tanya shared platonically with Edouard, a young Frenchman who made collages out of pictures of Bridget Bardot he cut from old magazines. I’d remembered having seen Tanya in a colorful mini-dress one day and I asked her to wear it for me and I photographed her straddling one of Edouard’s collages. Other than some portraits it’s one of the very few pictures I’ve actually produced, made happen. I was working in Paris photographing the fashion world for an all-France issue National Geographic had in the works. They never used the picture but Esquire later published it double page in an issue called “Women We Love.” Both pictures I gave Beryle are in my recent book WILLIAM ALBERT ALLARD: Five Decades. So much for the trade. I think Beryle has a few more wine boxes of LPs for me.

Another accomplishment this past week was getting the 48 inch upright Yamaha piano in the music room tuned. I can only play chords and fool with it but my grandson Will Evans, the son of my daughter Terri and her husband Dwayne, is taking lessons from the amazing Charlottesville pianist and raconteur, Art Wheeler. Although the piano hadn’t been tuned in almost three years it was not too far out but I thought Will, who turns 11 this month, should have a good piano available if he wants to come over to practice on something besides his electric keyboard. Now what I need to do is discipline myself to take my flugelhorn out every day or night for at least a few minutes and try to develop some chops, at least enough to amuse myself. It’s a good horn and should be put to use. I guess I think of instruments somewhat as I do cameras. They can be nice to admire and to hold but if they are really good they should be put to use. I think that’s why they say fine violins will kind of “go to sleep” if not played. I don’t think a Leica M camera will do that but I could never understand why Leica thought it appropriate to put out some of those special edition cameras that were obviously meant to be looked at but not necessarily used. My brother Bruce’s old Yamaha flugelhorn hangs on the wall in my writing room in Missoula. It’s got multiple dings and dents, the silver finish is worn down to brass around the valve casings where he’d held it for so many years. It’s a well used horn, certainly not pretty, but I can still sometimes get it to play easier if not better than my Bach Stradivarius that I’ll haul out to Montana later this month along with the dogs and other stuff.

Last night I pulled out at random from one of Beryle’s wine boxes, a Sarah Vaughan LP, “How Long Has This Been Going On?” cut in 1978 with the personnel of Oscar Peterson on piano, Joe Pass on guitar, Ray Brown on bass, and Louie Bellson on drums. Listen again to those names: Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass, Ray Brown, Louie Bellson. Those were some of the finest musicians of their time or of any time. And they’re playing behind one of the greatest voices of any time: Sarah Vaughn. Listening to that record last night with a glass of Chilean red, I mused at what an extraordinary instrument is the human voice. This may not be one of Sarah Vaughan’s greatest efforts but she was such an incredible singer. Many of her contemporary female vocalists must have marveled at her ability to soar from a standing start with no apparent effort and her ability to bring it down again with such grace and feeling. Some might say she could sometimes go a bit too far with her vocal acrobatics, but at her best she was simply unsurpassed. At least that’s my opinion. A year or so ago I read a Sarah Vaughan biography called “Sassy.” She evidently loved to party hard after a gig and could do so long and late but still show up with all the goods when it was time to do so. There’s something to be said for that. On the other hand, she died at 66. I like to think that’s not exactly old. I was 66 once. It was nice.