Rolf Harris, the entertainer, has just been convicted of assaulting young girls with further allegations to come.

Over twenty years ago I photographed him in his house by the Thames for the Sunday Times magazine. He was quite pleasant enough. On the coffee table was a Stylograph (a musical toy he used to advertise on TV when I was a kid) and also aboriginal flint circumcision knife with a serrated edge.

While getting in his car to drive me back to the train station he did his back in. I sent him a print and he sent me back a thank you letter with a cartoon of himself drawn on the envelope.

I came up with the idea of cutting out the parts of a horse in card and lining them up so they would project the dissected shadow of a horse on the wall as whole. After a little more thought I wondered if I could could make a shadow of a woman riding the horse that was also a face. After several attempts it worked to my satisfaction. I then went on to make a face out of the cut-outs of birds and twisted the stem of an artificial flower into the profile of a woman.

Then one day while looking through an old folder of magazine pictures I had saved for one reason or another, I came across one and I was attracted by the shadows that fell on the uplifted face. Looking harder, the shadows around the eyes looked almost like butterflies to me.
This led to me using butterflies a lot in my work, the culmination being pinning taxidermy butterflies to nudes with acupuncture needles labeled with their Latin names.

Shadow of Flowers Turn into Face

My photo is being used on the cover of a book published in Argentina.

https://www.facebook.com/AllaAbajo

I was photographing a model with her eighteen month old chihuahua named Puppy. It had been very quiet but then she looked out the window and started barking at a black woman in a long black coat. The model told me whenever she saw someone in long black clothes she would bark and this was mostly at Islamic women in traditional garb. I did not have the presence of mind ask what happened when she saw Hasidic Jews and Goths.

This brought back the memory of several years ago when I was in a park on the outskirts of London when I heard a man shouting for his dog, Nigger. The British amputee WWII fighter ace, Douglas Bader, had a black Labrador called Nigger but that was 70 years ago and PC did not apply then. I was astonished that anyone would do that in this day and age and thought he could only get away with it because he lived on the edge of town. It amused me to imagine him in an inner city park shouting, “Here Nigger, here boy”!

Alva Bernadine passes on a culinary tip.

Brockwell park, south London