The Warmth of Mexico - Part VIII - The Colour of Light.

The Warmth of Mexico Part I

The Warmth of Mexico Part II
The Warmth of Mexico Part III
The Warmth of Mexico Part IV
The Warmth of Mexico Part V 
The Warmth of Mexico Part VI 

The Warmth of Mexico Part VII

Below you will find a meandering story about the colour of light, the colour of light in Mexico and illustrated, strangely by portraits in b+w (that I have added colour) of  a lovely Mexican girl who was a bleach blonde but had green eyes. The film was Kodak B+W Infrared film which is sensitive to part of the spectrum that we humans cannot see.

Few know that sunlight has color. The colour of sunlight varies with latitude. Light in Whistler BC (on a sunny day) renders snow with a blue cast. Bright colours at lower latitudes seem brighter. Why?

As soon as Eastman Kodak was about to market its new Kodachrome transparency film in 1935 they seconded one of their handsome (and white) executives to pose at noon in Washington DC while wearing a white shirt. For the purposes of securing an accuracy of colour the shirt had to be seen as an absolute white while the man’s skin was to look healthy. They finally narrowed down the calibration and Kodachrome was launched.

Why was Washington DC chosen and why at noon? Obvious to most, we do know that sunrises and sunsets get rosy and red. At noon light is devoid of colour (this is relative to latitude). Because the US was becoming a world power and its centre was DC the latitude for it became a norm.

Now if you were to have a roll of pristine 1935 Kodachrome and you were to expose it to a white executive wearing a white shirt at noon on a sunny day in Whistler, DC and Florida you would have a bluish shirt in the Whistler shot, an accurate DC shot (except on a smoggy day) and your Florida shot would show you a warmish white shirt.

Another factor in the colour of light is how we humans see ultra violet light.

In the colour spectrum ranging from infra-red (we cannot see it) to red all the way to blue, purple and indigo there is ultra-violet which we cannot see but some animals, birds and insects can.

An ultra-violet camera filter which ranges from colourless to a soft pink, blocks the access of UV which makes film, video and digital images bluish.

People living at different latitudes see colour in a different way particularly in their choice of colours for their everyday life. You might find lots of red cars (red Ferraris in hot Italy) at the lower latitudes while in Vancouver or Sweden there will be blue cars, green cars and many a silver car.

While teaching English at Palmolive in the early 70s the company had just introduced a refreshing (it had ether!) toothpaste called Ultra-Brite. One day while teaching a class of marketing executives I put some colours on the blackboard with coloured chalk. One the left side I had swaths of black, dark blue, light blue and white. On the right I had orange, red, yellow and a bit of blue. I asked them which colours they preferred. The all signalled the colours on the right. I then surprised them with the fact that the colours they had not chosen were the colours of Ultra-Brite while the ones they had liked were that of the competitor, Crest.

I will make the blanket statement here that Ultra-Brite may have failed when it was revealed that it had ether but I would assert here that Mexicans were not “sophisticated” enough to accept the “sober” colours on the end of the colour spectrum.

I will not go into further details on colour temperature as I wrote about it in detail here. What is important to note is that in Mexico light is warmer to our eyes and skies even on cloudy days rarely have that frigid cyan/blue of Vancouver.

Some might wonder why it is that I am using these portraits of a Mexican blonde here as they are in b+w. Her name is long gone from my memory. The story behind the pictures is below.

Arturito Durazo Díaz (33) showed up in Vancouver in 1982. At the time I had some dealings with the unofficial Mexican Tourism Director in Vancouver, Carlos Hampe. I visited Hampe and noticed Durazo sitting behind a desk that had nothing on it in a room that was virtually empty of furniture and decoration. I was introduced to him. He was affable, friendly and interested in the fact that I was a photographer and that I spoke Spanish.

During his stay in Vancouver which was around two years he often came to my house for dinner. He had a passion for jig-saw puzzles. He often stayed for hours with my daughters fitting the pieces to 1000 plus puzzles. Durazo told me he had helicopter pilot’s license and wanted to learn to hang glide. I accompanied him to many of these lessons in Langley. He was brave and he tried to convince me to try. I told him I had no life insurance and since I was a free lancer, any accident would leave my family with no financial support.

My daughters liked him as did my wife Rosemary. One day he showed up with a box full of beautiful Florsheim shoes. He told me that inmates of several Mexican prisons made them and he was starting a business to import them to Canada.

Any questions I directed to Hampe about his “assistant”, who seemed to do nothing at the office, only resulted in the rolling of his eyes and silence.

All I knew was that Durazo’s father, Arturo Durazo Moreno had been the chief of police in Mexico City, between 1976 and 1982 during the 6-year rule of President López Portillo.

During those 6 years Durazo Moreno’s underlings had to pay their quota of contributions. There was an organization that arrested promising thieves who were protected and of course had to pay their quotas. In some cases these trained thieves and the policemen robbed banks. One of the biggest scandals was the appearance of 13 Colombians in the city’s main sewer. Some had their heads missing; others had been mutilated and tortured.

López Portillo’s successor, President Miguel de La Madrid initiated an investigation and the murders were linked to Durazo who fled the country.

That would explain why his son, also left the country and why Carlos Hampe could do nothing about having the man appear in his office and get a salary for doing nothing. I remember that Arturito had a better car than Hampe. It was a very large Pontiac.

Arturito was a handsome young man. His father was quite ugly and because he was dark-skinned he was called El Negro Durazo. Durazo died in 2000 after having served 6 years (he had been extradited from Puerto Rico, and given a 16 years sentence but because of “good behaviour” and delicate health he served those 6 for drug trafficking, corruption and extortion). At his funeral a police mariachi played a famous song about El Negro Durazo.

As soon as Durazo Moreno died the army generals rescinded his lofty rank of General de División. They had been furious when President López Portillo had celebrated the man with the rank.

In the late 80s a Mexican cumbia band, La Sonora Dinamita recorded a song by its then singer Juliette called El Africano (The African) in which one of the lines “Hey mom, what does El Negro want?” to which then Juliette answers, “Could it be another Parthenon?” Of interest to readers here is the fact that Ray Conniff did an instrumental version of the song called African Safari.

This was my Arturito’s father. In 2005 Arturito was imprisoned for unlawfully taking over a large property. He is now probably out and is on Facebook.

If you look for images of Arturito you will only find one through Google. The Mexican newspapers announcing his arrest have blank squares where his picture should be.

I was never allowed by Arturito to take his picture but he did ask me to photograph his lovely Mexican girl friend who had brilliant bleached blonde hair. I have lost the colour pictures and I have forgotten her name but I did find some negatives which I took with Kodak b+w infrared film.

If I were to run into Arturito I would invite him for dinner and I would take out a box with a 1000 plus piece puzzle.