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"So many people have asked me how I start to compile a book of my own
photographs that I would like to give a very brief account of an
event that decided me to produce this new volume.
One day, in Victoria, B.C., a woman asked whether I was 'the Roye'.
I said that I was 'Roye the Photographer', if that was what she
meant. She went on to say that she had heard me broadcast the
previous evening from Seattle, where I had been lecturing at the
North West Pacific Photographers Convention. She had also copies of
some of my previous books of s, and was familiar with my work
from the days of my first Studio in Paris.
Now to the real object of her visit. Her daughter shared her
enthusiasm for photography and sunbathing and it was, indeed, her
ambition to be a model. Perhaps she might be able to model for me?
Would I meet her? I agreed and all three of us met later on the
private beach of my Summer house on the Saanich Inlet, Vancouver
Island.
I rarely use professional artist's models because they have a
tendency to be 'static'. Instead, I usually use showgirls or dancers
who are trained in the arts of deportment and are gracefully feminine.
Inez had dark brown eyes and chestnut hair. She had never modeled
before, but as you will see for yourself from the photographs on the
following pages, she had a natural grace and beauty.
About this time I was photographing the contestants for the title of
'Miss Victoria', an annual contest which attracts most of the pretty
girls of Vancouver Island, and which, later, Inez won.
The 'runner-up' that year was Jannine, a blonde of twenty with green
eyes, and that young modern look that seems to be the birthright of
girls of the New World.
What a contrast this fair Jannine would make to the dark Inez, I
thought, and at that moment this book was born!
The beach, where most of the photographs were taken, was probably the
most perfect natural studio I ever had. Across the water from the
rock-rimmed shore where we worked, the Malahat Mountain rose like a
theatre backdrop, thickly covered with Oregon Pine. Around us the
Dogwood and Arbutus trees grew within feet of the water's edge. And
along the sand, hidden clams, something like scallops only smaller
would send up their warning spouts of water if anyone went too near
them.
There was no shortage of wild life.
Wild mink would run along the bank behind us if we were sunbathing
quietly, and sometimes take to the sea and swim to another part of the
shore as a short cut instead of going round by land on their own four
feet.
Herons stood patiently still in the water; and crafty gulls would
swoop down, pick up a clam, then rise high enough to drop it on the
rocks and so break its shell.
But they had even craftier neighbors. I sometimes saw a dour old crow
waiting near the edge of the rocks, and he would dart out and steal the
now defenseless clam before the gull could get to it.
It was in this natural Eden, which the late John Buchan described Kipling
as calling 'the only earthly paradise he had ever discovered' that all
these photographs were taken.
I used two cameras. One was a British quarter plate Tropical Model Soho
Reflex Camera, the other an American 4" by 5" Graflex Camera. The film
used was Kodak Super XX developed in a standard formula. I did not use a
tripod, had no assistant to hold reflectors, and no flash fill-in for the
contre-jour shots.
Now, for the photographs themselves.
You may find this hard to believe, but they are all of one or other of
these two models, Jannine and Inez. From some of the pictures it might seem
that other models were used, but this was not so.
This brings me to an important point. Ordinary portraiture consists of
producing an obvious likeness of some given person which could not be
mistaken for anyone else. But in real life, have you never seen a friend,
appearing perhaps in an unaccustomed light, look like a stranger? I have,
often!
In some of the following studies you will see this illustrated very clearly.
By varying the combinations and ratios of light and shade and camera angles,
the same model appears as someone quite different, indeed, as many different
girls.
Canadian Beauty is a beauty all of its own, a new kind of beauty.
Every country has its natural type of beauty; the olive-skinned Italian girl,
the English rose, the smooth sophistication of the French. But the beauty of
the New World like the New World itself, has taken something from all these
other beauties and fused them together to form one lovely amalgam. Not the
'pale-skinned beauty of the North' that Addison wrote about, but a new kind
of lithe-limbed, vivacious loveliness that makes Canadian girls outstanding in
the world of good looks. My two models had a maturity and self-assurance that
belied their youth and which was, to a European, astonishing but also
interesting and symbolic of Canada's uninhibited way of life.
These two girls, Inez and Jannine, remind me of the words I read once :
'She is beautiful when her clothes are on, But beauty itself when her
clothes are gone.'
Both are beautiful, both different, both typical of Canadian Beauty."
-Roye (edited)
Boy that's allot of fluff just to say that these woman were very
attractive. Inez and Jannine were photographed in 1952. Both were very
beautiful and I'm glad they were not shy about posing in front of the
camera. Horace Roye gave a nice range of over and under exposing these
models for different looks. Much of 1950s photography was mired in
pin-up. In the hands of a master, and minus any pin-up overtones, figure
photography was something splendid. These photos are not too artsy
either which can be just as horrid as pin-up. They are what they are.
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