Thursday, August 21, 2008


"La Santa Muerte" era el título de mi próximo artículo dominical. Karla Sánchez, una reportera de nuestro diario, había investigado la muerte de Jessica (así, sin apellido) a manos de La Flaca, una mujer bastante miserable con una sola capacidad: la de cometer un crimen horroroso en honor de la Santa Muerte. Con sus cómoplices Ojo Machucado, el Víbora y Cabeza de Piedra (fugitivos) había celebrado el asesinatoy desmembramiento de la dich Jessica en un cuartucho situado en el primer piso de un edificio nombre en un callejón anónimo de las orillas de una ciudad perdida. A los pies de una mesa que servía de altar se habían encontrado los despojos de la hoy occisa. Lado a lado, en un altar se habían colocado las imágenes de la Santa Muerte y de la Virgen de Guadalupe. El sincretismo de la Flaca saltaba a la vista al reunir bajo el mismo techo a la muerte azteca (representada por la Santa Muerte) y a la católica Virgen de Guadalupe. El altar estaba adornado por un cráneo humano, florero de vidrio rojo y cuchillos de carnicero. Velas rojas apagadas no lo alumbraban. A La Flaca se le halló acostada en un camastro rodeado de bolsas negras con basura, y con droga en una mesita de noche. En una hielera la cultista guardaba un camisón ensangrentado, vísceras humanas y una pantaleta (de Jessica)

Página 14 y 15, La Santa Muerte, Homero Aridjis 2003, Alfaguara


"La Santa Muerte" was the title of my next Sunday article. Karla Sánchez, a reporter of our newspaper had researched the death of Jessica (like that, without a surname) at the hands of La Flaca (the Skinny One). La Flaca was fairly miserable and she had but one skill which was to commit a horrible crime in honour of La Santa Muerte. With her accomplices Smashed Eye, The Snake and Stone Head (fugitives) she had celebrated the murder and dismemberment of the aforementioned Jessica in a hell hole of a room on the first floor of a building with no name in an anonymous back lane at the edge of a slum. Beneath a table that served as an altar, they had found remains of the victim. Side by side on the altar lay images of La Santa Muerte and the Virgin of Guadalupe. la Flaca's sincretism was astoudingly obvious as under one roof she had brought together Aztec death (represented by La Santa Muerte) and the Catholic Virgin of Guadalupe. The altar was adorned with a human skull, red glass vases and butcher knives. Unlit red candles did not light the scene. The Skinny One had been found lying on a cot surrounded by black bags full of garbage and drugs on a bed side table. The cultist had placed in a cooler a bloody dressing gown, human organs and a panty (Jessica's).

Page 14 and 15, La Santa Muerte, Homero Aridjis, 2003, Alfaguara, my translation.

-Oh,Santa Muerte, protégeme y líbrame de mis enemigos, embóscalos, tortúralos, enférmalos, mátalos, hazlos picadillo, Oh Santa Muerte, que dominas el mundo, en nombre de los que aquí están postrados, te pido poder conra mis adversarios. Que no me quiebren, que no me arresten, que no me maten. Te pido, Santa Muerte mía, que no me desampares ni de noche ni de día, y que me defiendas de la traición de amigos y enemigos. También te pido la muerte violenta de los que buscan mi mal. Llévatelos a la Casa Oscura donde tiritan de frío los muertos. Llévatelos a la Casa de los Murciélagos, donde chillan y revolotean los heridos de bala y bayoneta. Llévatelos a la Casa de las Navajas, donde rechinan las armas blancas. Todo lo puedes tú, Santa Muerte, concédeme este favor. Amén.

Página 127-128 La Santa Muerte, Homero Aridjis, 2003, Alfaguara


Oh!, Santa Muerte, protect me and deliver me from my enemies, ambush them, torture them, make them sick, kill them, make them into mince meat. Oh! Santa Muerte, you who are in command over the world in name of those who kneel here before you, I ask you for power against my adversaries. That they do not break me, arrest me or kill me. I ask you, my Santa Muerte, that you do not abandon me night or day and that you defend me from the treason of my friends and enemies. I also ask for the violent death of those who seek to harm me. Take them to the Dark House where the dead tremble with cold. Take them to the House of Bats where those wounded by bullets and bayonets senselessly fly and scream. Take them to the House of Razors where blades and knives screech. You can do all this, Santa Muerte. Grant me this wish. Amen.

Page 127-128 La Santa Muerte, Homero Aridjis, 2003, Alfaguara , my translation.




Mexican poet and novelist Homero Arijdis has been writing about (in several excellent novels and books of poetry) the "sincretismo" or the ability of the Mexican aboriginal to combine and meld the ancient gods of the Aztecs, Toltecs, Maya, etc with the God of the conquering Spaniards to form a curious and interesting blend of beliefs, superstition and wisdom that is unique in our modern world. In his book La Santa Muerte he tells of the La Santa Muerte (a most feminine Saint Death) who is venerated by drug lords and their gang members.

Before the book was published in 2003 I received and email from Aridjis's wife Betty, informing me with much excitement about this book. She was right about her excitement as the book left in me a lasting impression. When my friend Abraham Rogatnick (86) who seems to be preparing for his death by getting rid of all his stuff gave me his 48-year-old Mexican papier-mâché skeleton I knew I somehow had a project. Ms Hernandez agreed and here she is a most beautiful but scary Santa Muerte. I told Abraham about it and he was delighted.

Wednesday, August 20, 2008


evangelista.(Del lat. evangelista).

1. m. Cada uno de los cuatro discípulos de Jesús con cuyo nombre se designa uno de los cuatro Evangelios.

2. m. Persona destinada a cantar el evangelio en las iglesias.

3. m. Méx. Hombre que tiene por oficio escribir cartas u otros papeles a la gente que no sabe hacerlo.

Real Academia Española © Todos los derechos reservados

Your ordinary poor Mexican may not have any idea who Cyrano de Bergerac is as many (at least in my time in the 50s, 60s and 70s) did not know how to read or write. This did not prevent them from writing love letters, letters of condolence, letters to government bureaucracy or perhaps attempting to find a job with a nice and neat application letter. Cyrano's job was performed and perhaps even today by men (they were always men) called evangelistas. An evangelio (or gospel) is a letter. Evangelistas are the scribes of the populace. They set up shop under portales (long arched sidewalks in the centre of Mexican cities) with a typewriter (usually ancient) and paper. For a fee they will strive to please.

Rosemary has informed me that we used the services of an evangelista once for some sort of government petition re our house and we did not know the legal language to use. Our evangelista had no problem making a one sentence request occupy a whole page. Our request was granted.

Here Ms Hernandez is posing with my pinstriped suit which I purchased at the Puerto de Liverpool (sort of like Eaton's) sometime in 1972. Her tie, a Fraser Institute tie, (why not?) was given to me by a friend who worked for the institute. I tried to explain to Ms Hernandez what the Fraser Institute was but in the end I gave up.

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

I went to Beau Photo today. It is the only photo equipment and supply store that routinely stocks the Ektachrome 100G in 120 which is what I use to take photographs in colour. Sooner or later when that film and or labs in Vancouver stop processing I will have to purchase a digital camera for my commercial work. I will still shoot Ektachrome or whatever other film replaces it and I will have it processed in Toronto or New York. When it becomes impossible it is my hope that by then I will have been vaporized in some lucky accident and my widow will be sipping Fanta on a Mexican beach. While in Beau Photo I went from the film, paper and other stuff side of the store to the photo equipment and studio lighting side of the store. With my bag of film ($300 worth) I stared at all the lighting stuff that makes what I use look like a Studebaker Scotsman (this Studebaker tried to bring the idea of frugality and it sported no chrome. The idea was ahead of its time so the car failed). An elderly man (I guess if I looked at myself in a mirror I would define myself as one) was getting rid of all his ancient gear. There were a couple of nice looking Pentacon Six 6x6cm cameras, one Mamiya RB-ProS like mine with two lenses, some sort of 4x5 inch field camera and a 6x6cm slide projector that looked like it had bored audiences for many years. The man looked at me and with a smile he said, "I am selling my stuff, I am downsizing and moving to an apartment. You know how it is?" I had to tell him that his Pentacon Sixes were dogs that had been made by reluctant German engineers in the Russian Occupied Zone of Germany and later by the same engineers, turned lazy bureaucrats of East Germany in the fine city of Dresden. "They have their peculiarties but as long as you know what they are the cameras work just fine." Whe he told me that, I countered with, "These were built before Germans started making good Audis." I did not remind him that the predecessors of Audi at that time were making DKWs that had a three cylinder engine that sounded like eggs frying in deep fat. But I admired his 140mm Mamiya lens with a floating lens element (I own two of these extremely sharp lenses). He smiled at me more generously. When he left with his receipt, what he had last told me reverberated in my head, "If they offer me too little I will take them back and give them away." About four years ago I went to MCL Motorcars to photograph a man who managed the exotic automobile section of the company. I admired a beautiful dark blue Aston Martin. The man, an Englishman, barely smiled under his moustache and then sadly told me, "Don't look under the hood, it's a Ford." Every once in a while when I am using my two Nikon FM-2s which are nicely finished in metal and make satisfying clicks I think of where they came from. I think of the exotic Contax of the 1930s (more desirable to me than a Leica) and how that kind of machine work and fine manufacturing is all but dead. My German repairman, Horst Wenzel fixes mechanical cameras and restores them. He was trained at the Hasselblad plant and instinctively knows how mechanical cameras work. But he will not look at the latest crop of cameras. You need computers to access information on where and how to repair them. You have to be an electronics wizard. You have to be so specialized that you might be able to look into the latest Nikon but not the Canon. I cannot believe that somehow the Germans started all this with their people's car, the VW Beetle. By early 70s my Mexican VW repair facility in Mexico City would plug into my car and check on a computer the compression of the engine. I was given the readout and told that my engine was in good shape at 90%. I remember going to McQueen Sales (the Canadian representative of Asahi Pentax) in the early 80s with a Pentax ME Super that had failed me at a job. Kas, the consumate Japanese technician told me, "We have a new improved circuit board for it." The folks at Pentax in Vancouver had known

Monday, August 18, 2008



The 1956-1957 Lincoln Continental Mark II was the mid-'50s successor to the original Continental of the '40s. It was magnificently styled by a team including John Reinhart, William Clay Ford, and Gordon Buehrig. Engineer Harley Copp's unique "cowbelly" frame dipped low to permit high seating without a tall body.

With Multi-Drive three-speed automatic and a balanced, individually tested Lincoln V-8, the Mark II was marketed as an image leader intended to steal Cadillac's thunder in the ultra-luxury class.

Despite beautiful styling, it didn't sell well, probably because its price was so close to the (then) breathtaking $10,000 mark.

Last Thursday Rebecca, Graham Walker, Abraham Rogatnick and I went to UBC to the Chan Centre to listen to Rameau's Pygmalion presented by Early Music Vancouver. We picked up Rogatnick on our way. He lives on 11th Avenue and Trimble. We then proceded by Chancellor Boulevard. I have always been confused since it is similar (at the tail end near UBC) to University Boulevard. At one time what looked like a stately American antebellum mansion sat at the end. It is gone and there is a lot of construction of what looks like luxury condonminiums.



It was in front of that mansion that I photographed sometime around 1977 the most beautiful car in the world. It was an 1956-57 Lincoln Continental Mark II and its owner had hired me to take pictures of it. Little did he know that I knew little of this. I managed to overlook the rule that cars should be photographed free of distortion. I even (cringe) used a star filter to put stars on the headlights.



But I remember the mansion and the automobile fondly. I found the colour negatives in my files and had to use the colour restoration device of my scanner as those colour negatives had deteriorated with time. Even now that car seems to be a beautiful ghost with an existence all of its own.

Sunday, August 17, 2008

"Mental prayer [oración mental] is nothing else than a close sharing between friends; it means taking time frequently to be alone with him who we know loves us."

Santa Teresa de Jesús (St Teresa of Ávila)



Several events today made me suddenly turn into thinking about religion. At least in the sense that I want to write about it without in any way wishing to rant, nor is it my intention to proselytize.

I talked to my godmother (and first cousin) Inesita on Skype today. She is 86 and lives in Buenos Aires. She was visiting her son Georgito with whom I have been close since we independently served in the army (he) and the navy (me) in 1965. We talked and looked at each other for close to two hours. We talked about old age pensions (he is 64, I am about to be 66). In the end our conversation had to terminate because he was going to Sunday Mass. He made the comment (wrong one) that my last time at church was probably after my first communion. He was wrong, after all I went to a Catholic boarding school (high school) for four years.

It was at St Edward's High School that Brother Edwin Reggio C.S.C. taught me that perhaps the most important sacrament is that of confirmation. Confirmation, Brother Edwin had told us, made us soldiers of Christ. It made us defenders of our faith. It made us defenders (not in any agressive way) in being able to explain doctrine and our beliefs with clarity to those who might want to know.

I remember returning from my military service in Buenos Aires to Mexico and somehow ending up at Sunday Mass in a church not far from my Tia Fermina's. The service was odd to me in many ways. I had grown up with the classical Latin Mass. In this Mexican church the priest was facing us and speaking to us in Spanish. I understood somehow that Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council were responsible for this strange turn of events at Mass. At one point during the service, the people by my side (I did not know them from Adam) suddenly embraced me. I was confused but they explained to me that this was the people's Mass and that's how things were done. My further but infrequent journeys into Catholic Mass services became mandatory funerals and the odd wedding. Sunday Mass was as dead to me as that April 8, 1966 Time Magazine cover, Is God Dead?

But it has been very difficult to let go. Consider that when I was 8, 9 and 10 my grandmother came to visit us to our Coghlan house in Buenos Aires on Good Friday. I was brought in from playing with my Jewish friend (Mario Hertzberg) out in the street and told to kneel in the living room. The time was somewhere around 3 in the afternoon when my grandmother asserted our Lord had died. She often would say that my friend Mario's ancestors, the Jews, had cruelly crucified our Lord. She would then lead us to recite the last words of Christ. The day was ever more depressing as I was told that we could not listen to any music.

It was about this time (1952, 1953) that Father Filippo informed us that if we did not become followers of Perón we would roast in hell.

In the mid 50s my mother was stricken by a terrible disease (it can be controlled now but it is still incurable) called Meniere's. This disease attacked the inner ear. It began with a buzz that got louder and louder. It was constant and it came with terrible attacks of nausea. My mother would just fall and would spend hours in bed holding on for dear life. Eventually the buzz and the disease destroyed her sense of balance and made her deaf even though the buzz never went away. By 1972 she was telling me that she wanted to die. One very terrible day she confessed to me that she had lost her belief in the power of prayer. "I do believe in God, " she told me, "but I don't believe in a God who cares about us. He is up there somewhere and is detached from human existence. We must really think we are important that He would want to listen to each one of us." And she died and Rosemary and I listened as she breathed in and never did exhale.

All the above went through my head today. Hilary lent us her copy of Milos Forman's Goya's Ghost. I know my Spanish history and I did note a few innacuracies of time compression, but the film was horrific in its display of the power of the Inquisition and the Catholic Church as the 18th century waned.

Having studied theology in school I understood the events of the film. The situation with the so called "trials" of the Inquisition have the also horrific parallel with those of the contemporary detention camps for terrorists in our Western world. We have simply not changed even if we do embrace at Mass.

Rebecca has seen this film and I wonder how at age 11 (today, happy birthday Rebecca) she can possibly understand all the complexities and intricacies of this disturbing film. Would she smile (no)? Or gasp in horror (no)? when my grandmother would point at some man with a large nose and say in her Castilian Spanish, "That man has the map of Jerusalem on his face."

I have mentioned here of my admiration for Graham Greene and of his novels of flawed protagonists who would lose their faith. In some small way this man (me) a product of the Latin Mass who was shockingly modernized with an embrace (not quite on the Concorde) has lost his way.

I look longingly at this photograph of my mother's first communion in New York City in 1920. Here, too is her rosary (of pressed rose petals) and dedicated to St Teresa of Ávila. Will I ever know which of them was right?

Saturday, August 16, 2008


The spanish word for mirror is espejo. Espejismo is Spanish for mirage. I like espejo so much more. It is close to the original meaning in Latin, speculum which was mirror but specially a mirror in the water. A true espejismo in Spanish defines the term as an image that is upside down. In pre-columbian Mexico the word for mirror was obsidian since this was the only readily available surface that could act as a mirror. Gold and silver were far too precious for the ordinary Aztec. I like the idea of an obsidian mirror. Its darkness would colour the image in mysterious magic. After all trying to figure out our relationship with our image in a mirror is just that.

Since I purchased a large and beautiful wooden framed mirror at Ikea I have become nearly obsessed with taking portraits with it. From self-portraits to photographs of my subjects looking at themselves into a mirror. Dancers and actors are so used to this that I am able to easily have them forget I am in the room. In my classes at Focal Point (the school purchased the Ikea mirror at my urging) I have my students go through their paces with the mirror. They soon find out it is far easier not to include oneself in the photograph than not. And if the mirror is positioned away from the wall it can be easily lit.

Last week when I started my Mexican nostalgia project with Ms. Hernandez she indicated she wanted a mirror shot with me in it. Here it is.

Friday, August 15, 2008




Of late I have been overcome by moments of pure Mexican nostalgia. We eat a lot of Mexican food at home. This is Mexican food that I cook. One of my family's favourite is my Mexican rice. The secret to Mexican rice is that you have to fry it first and then add chicken broth. Rosemary loves to have yesterday's Mexican rice with fried eggs today. Both Rebecca and Hilary are a bit more daring than Rosemary so I have to make two hot sauces. One has tomatoes, cilantro a bit of surgar, Maldon salt and some fresh squeezed lime juice. To the second sauce I add several serrano peppers. This recipe was given to me by my Mexican/American friend, Robert Hijar who lives in Memphis. He insists that good Mexican salsa never has onion.

My Mexican nostalgia has been peppered on the side by the presence of my new Mexican model, Ms. Hernandez. I a couple of previous blogs I have shown pictures of her. Here is one in colour with some old fashioned Hollywood lighting. I used a metal stamped gobo for the cloud background and my mother's 1953 red sarape. While it was around 26 in my studio it was not hot enough to evoke the brilliant hot light of Mexico. I rarely used a high spot but here it almost brings to me an idea of that heat and light that I long for. Tonight as I lie in bed without covers and not much else the heat will remind me of Mexico and the smell of the tropics of my life in Veracruz or the dry desert heat of my Nueva Rosita, Coahuila days.

This photograph has a bit of John Ford's (1947) The Fugitive , one of my favourite films of all time which was based on a Graham Greene story with the lovely Dolores del Río, Henry Fonda and Pedro Armendáriz.

In colour I can imagine del Río in red just like Ms Hernandez.