Fashion photography without a model

Making do with what you’ve got…

Archival: Didn’t have a model, nor a dress form so a microphone stand had to stand in. 

Juliet: Ingenious. And how’s your website rebuild going?

Archival: Still rethinking it. Can’t run an online school now. Too much itty bitty stuff to deal with. Want to focus on presentation and pictures and text.

Juliet: Hmm.

Archival: It’s a bit like Kathy. This was thirty years ago. I asked her to join the team. She was such a good teacher. Great team player. Long phone conversation. Said she wasn’t teaching anymore, just wanted to focus on her pottery.

Juliet: She did?

Archival: A year later she was gone. Then I knew why. She hadn’t said. But she was right. Hence my studio and resorting to make-shift and make-do props.

Juliet: And a pinwheel face on a new garment.

Archival: Right. Focus and be a little outlandish.

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Voice-over

Leave images and statements. They might outlive you.

Japonica Journeys

Pre-departure

Edgar: The japonica was blooming when I arrived last year. It’s blooming again when I depart.

Cecilia: One year.

Edgar: Been a bit of an unsettling circle around the sun. Pandemic, climate, war. Then William Hurt. Only 71. Same thing.

Cecilia: But everyone is different.

Edgar: If celebrities like him can’t beat it back, it’s a bit discouraging for we lessers. Even if we go hospital hopping.

_______

Voice-over

What can you say? What can a doctor say? Kent put it this way, “There is a journey I’m shortly to go. I cannot say no.” 

Government order: No travel to funerals allowed

Cousins discuss a passing by text messages…

Adelle: So we can only farewell her by social media.

Molly: The messages coming in are sympathetic.

Adelle: It must have been difficult for her in her isolation in the retirement home, sitting by the window every day, no visitors allowed. I never heard a word of complaint from her.

Molly: Except she used to say, “I can’t understand what’s going on in the world. Has everybody died?” Inside, she was very anxious.

Adelle: Life was tough for her at the end. She once told me, you really don't want to live past about 90. It all goes to pieces then.

Molly: Both of your parents have been the most incredible people.

Adelle: Nice of you to say so. When we have had our parents in our lives for more than sixty or seventy years it’s a huge gap when they go.

Molly: I am sure they will live on in the character of all your family for generations to come.

Adelle: Thank you, but which bits of their DNA ended up in each of us?

_________

Voice-over

Focus on only keeping pandemic case numbers distorts how people pass away from other things.

Going down fighting

Grigori returns from visiting his brother Vladimir, Grigori thinks it was the last time he will see Vlad.

...

Grigori: The nurse was there when I arrived, she’d left some medicine, some heart medicine…

Alexandre: To get it going again if it stopped?

Grigori: Maybe not. Maybe to make it easy. She was from the hospice.

Alexandre: Did he recognize you?

Grigori: I thought he was gone at one stage. No pulse for a whole minute. Then it started again. I said, “It’s me, Grigori.” And he opened one eye. And I said, “Everyone says hello and Godspeed.” And then he whispered, “Tha - thang.”

Alexandre: He heard.

Grigori: He understood. But the nurse said, it’s going to be difficult for him. He’s the type that doesn’t let go easily. He may hang on for a few days. Or more.

Alexandre: Vlad’s a fighter. In the war. Escaping from the prison camp. Breaking in the farm. Never giving up on his kids, even with one a full-on bipolar.

Grigori: He’s not going to let go easily. He’ll hang on and on and go down fighting. It’s going to be hard on us all.

_____________

Voice-over

The last days of a life. The words stop. Sight and touch become the channels of communication. Again. Just as in our first days of life.

...