Tuesday, September 07, 2010


My 90 year-old aunt Dolores de Irureta Goyena Humphrey has not spoken to me since my mother died in the early 70s. The reason is that I hold the family album. It has pictures beginning in 1888. Through the years her brother (my uncle) Antonio would visit my grandmother (who had the album) and he would purloin pictures. When my grandmother died my mother kept the album. When she died my aunt Dolores wanted it. So did I. I kept it.



When Alexandra was born in 1968 we had a beautiful leather bound album made for her. We did the same when Hilary was born and I transferred the old family albums into a brand new one (also leather bound). We meticulously kept it up to day until the day we left for Vancouver in 1975. I had spent many an evening in my little bathroom darkroom in Mexico City making little b+w 3 by 2 inch pictures.



Or I would have prints made from the colour negatives I shot. Once we arrived in Vancouver we stopped updating the albums which for in the years have lost pictures to further purloining or perhaps they fell out when the little black corners would unstick.



The pictures I have since taken, made it to our walls in frames and of late I have scanned them and placed them in my blogs of which today’s is an example.



Many of those pictures are not in an iconic shoe box. They are in a Coast Paper box which at one time contained 500 of my letterhead envelopes. Today I decided to surf (and then turf) the box and here are some of the pictures.




The last two sepia toned pictures are of my grandafather Tirso de Irureta Goyena with his factotum and the other of my mother and Uncle Tony with their maid in Madrid. The pictures must have fallen out of the big family album and Rosemary put them into the box.