Valentine special 009 - 010

It came as no surprise to me that Lettie went for the acting role in the Valentine glasses. However, there is enough reality in these portraits. Lettie is looking at her life partner Willem. So much better than the imaginary handsome man....

Valentine special 007 - 008

The Valentine glasses also traveled with me to England in May. Miliswa was one of the three models who posed for me in the Pavilion Gardens in Brighton. A model with a distinctive style of her own, Miliswa preferred to stay true to her own style of posing. She is slightly longsighted and the lenses in the Valentine glasses are minus eight. Not bothered by the blur, Miliswa achieved a natural, credible eye contact with her photographer.

Valentine special 004 - 006

Monique was one of the models who posed for me in Berlin in October. She preferred to pose in her own characteristic style, delivering these fine portraits under the willow tree.

Valentine special 003

The photography project started with Nel and she always kept inspiring and supporting my work. When we decided to split up in harmony two weeks before Christmas, I had serious doubt if there was enough reason for me to carry on with the project. It felt as if the very heart had just fallen out of it, so to speak. Nel then did her best to convince me that I should carry on with the project. She also assured me that she would pose again whenever her help was needed. And she did. This photo of was taken at Christmas. Nel made a deliberate choice to look at her photographer, ignoring the imaginary most handsome man in the world. Thank you, dear!

Valentine special 002

The extravagant Valentine glasses soon traveled with me to every new photo shoot, both at home and abroad. I asked the models to squeeze them in during their photo shoot. To my delight, many of them volunteered to pose in the Valentine glasses. The way of posing was of course up to the models themselves. Some models preferred to pose in them the same way they posed in all the other glasses. But other models saw the joke in it and upon my request, they threw in a bit of acting. My suggestion to them was as follows:

"Imagine all of a sudden the most handsome man in the world is standing next to me, on my right hand side. Now it's up to you to draw his attention. Ignore me, please keep looking at him and throw in your best effort. Express how you feel about him and you may win his heart".

As you can see, Julia was among the models who went for the acting bit.

Valentine special 001

The idea about doing a Valentine special for viewers of my weblog started with Julia, exactly one year ago. She was working in a shop that sold Valentine cards. It was Nel who suggested that we could send the biggest Valentine card in the shop to my daughter Daphne who just had an operation (breast cancer). There was only one giant Valentine card left, so I grabbed it and walked to the nice girl behind the counter to pay for the card. She said "Ah, there are only two giant cards left, is that correct?". I replied that this was the last card and noticed that she all of a sudden looked a bit sad. So I asked her if she had wanted the card herself. "Yes, but you can have it, I have no one to send it to anyway". My answer was "I can't change that for you right now. But I can do something that will give you a lot of exposure. And with a bit of luck, you may receive many Valentine cards next year". I paid her a compliment about her glasses, then told her briefly about the photography project and invited her to do a photo shoot. Julia immediately accepted the invitation. Some weeks after her photo shoot, I discovered a red heart shaped frame in the Zenni catalog and ordered it straightaway, fitted with -8.00 lenses. Julia kindly agreed to do some brief encore posing in the striking Valentine glasses.

The lady who first inspired me

Regular viewers of my weblog may remember the story about how my fascination with glasses started. The lady who gave me my first inspiration at the tender age of six was my grandmother. She was a bit shortsighted (circa -1.00) and she had a rimless pair for watching TV. But being in her mid sixties, she also used several reading glasses including a pink cat eye pair. Vanity was no stranger to her so the glasses came only out of her handbag when it was absolutely necessary. This is the only picture of my grandmother and me. It surfaced last week during another time consuming project unrelated to glasses. My late father Willem van Dijk (b. 1922 - d. 2001) was an amateur landscape photographer but on some occasions he would also take some pictures of his family and his other relatives. He left a collection of 20.000 slides which came my way after my mother died. This photo was taken in 1955 or 1956, around the time when I dared to ask my grandmother why she had all those various glasses. Instead of telling me about it, she asked me to put them up, one by one, and describe exactly what I saw, both in long and short distance. The rimless minus glasses seemed to make everything look ultra crisp but a bit smaller and further away. The pink reading glasses were a sensation. My hands looked quite enlarged and much closer than normal, and in the distance all was blurry. My grandmother did not explain anything and I asked no further questions. It dawned to me that either there was magic in her glasses or - more likely - she was a magician herself. This made sense to me. I was long familiar with the fact that my grandmother had mood swings. She could be withdrawn at times but extrovert on other occasions. In other words, she could push the world away at times and then embrace the world again when she felt better. Soon afterwards, I started observing women in glasses in the streets and I wondered if they were magicians as well. At the age of twelve, it came as a disappointment to learn the basics of optics at school. Apparently glasses were just a tool to correct vision problems. My grandmother died two years before this discovery so there was no opportunity for another talk about her glasses. So I decided that she was a magician after all and so were all girls and women in glasses. It's safe to say that I kept faith to that decision forever after.