Ivanova was
a Mexican woman in Vancouver who was studying criminology because she wanted to
be a policeman. I photographed her in the home of Argentine painters Juan
Manuel Sánchez and Nora Patrich.
Ivanova had a voluptuous body, one that her
Mexican counterpart, Manuel Álvarez Bravo would have savoured and appreciated.
I am not sure if in his later years Bravo used the 4x5 camera he inherited from
the Italian-born Tina Modotti when she was expelled from Mexico for being a communist.
Modotti had been given the camera by Edward Weston when he left Mexico for
California.
There is a nice symmetry there for which my ancillary photographs
of Ivanova in the nude, alas cannot be shown here.
Ivanova had
the look of Mexico in her face. There was something about her mouth and those
lips that conjured hot earth for me. Not the humid earth of my mother’s port
city of Veracruz but the dry desert heat of Nueva Rosita, Coahuila where I
lived when I was 16.
When I
asked Ivanova to cover her breasts with her hands, a terrible cliché! - there
were those long fingers of her hand that made me think of Coatlicue:
Coatlicue is multifaceted. As Coatlicue she is
the Aztec earth goddess, creator and destroyer of earth, mother of gods and
mortals, the one who gave birth to the moon and stars.
Time
Magazine
 |
| With Juan Manuel Sánchez |