But some of them are out and out simple. I cannot part with them. One of them is a beautifully rebound in leather by a French book maker in Mexico of my mother’s The Power and the Glory.


If any of you have ever been in Mexico you might understand that light is special in the country. One of the best cinematographers in the world was the Mexican Gabriel Figueroa (1907-1997). He worked in Hollywood, too especially with John Huston and John Ford. But one of my favourite films of all time (with luminous b+w photography by Figueroa) is John Ford’s, 1947, The Fugitive which was the renaming of Greene’s The Labyrinthine Ways (US title) and The Power and the Glory (the British title).

The film stars Henry Fonda, Dolores del Río (!!), Ward Bond and Pedro Armendáriz, perhaps the best Mexican actor of all time. In The Fugitive he plays a most scary police chief who is looking for the priest during the prohibition for saying mass in the 20s.

I photographed Ivette Hernández, who hails from León, Guanajuato for a couple of years imposing on her (and she imposed on me) our nostalgia for Mexico, its ways, its scenery, etc.

Here (even though I have a superb version in b+w) I want to show you my impression of Dolores del Río in The Fugitive. Ivette is wearing my mother’s red shawl before I had any idea of my red shawl project here. The clouds in the background are fake. I projected them against my studio wall with a focusing spotlight and a cloud gobo.