In the many years I lived in Mexico and the 9 years With Rosemary before we moved to Vancouver in 1975 we were well aware of the wonders of the place.
With Andrew Taylor my friend and compadre (godfather) of our first daughter Ale, (Andrew hailed from Yorkshire) we would go to the many places in the suburbs of Mexico City and to towns within the state to take pictures. Rosemary always was with us. Andrew was alone as he had yet to meet or marry his wife Ilse.
One of our favourite places was a coldish and rainy Valle de Bravo in the State of Mexico.
I have a contact sheet in which two of the photographs here were taken. I am very proud of them. It took me years later and with the help of Google to find out that El Buen Tono (the good thing, just right might be a close translation) was by then a defunct tobacco company that made cigarettes and cigars. I like this photograph because of the many hats.
The second photo makes me smile for I remember well that the little boy was holding a 20 cent coin to buy agua de sandía (a watermelon with water concoction).
But through the years in picking my Mexico street photographs I never bothered to notice this one of Rosemary with a very young Alexandra. It would have been taken in Valle de Bravo in early 1969 as Ale was born in August 1968.
It is very difficult for me to explain here (but then I don’t have to as this blog of mine is really a Dear Diary diary) what a photographer with hundreds of family photographs, negatives, and slides faces every day now that Rosemary died on December 2020. It is beyond looking at a family album. And there are many framed photographs on the wall that are another constant reminder of my loss.
There is a positive side to all this. As long as I write about Rosemary I can feel her close in my memory and in this diary of mine I believe I am doing the right and useful thing.
Joan Didion wrote: “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”
When I first read that a few months ago in her obituaries I suddenly found a purpose and ample justification in my writing about Rosemary and placing photographs of her when I could.
Some who have gotten this far might think, “Why doesn’t he let go and move on?”
A quick answer is “Because I don’t want to.”
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| Andrew Taylor |
My good friend Ian Bateson would say, "You are repeating yourself." And indeed he is right.
And some of Andrew Taylor's iconic photographs of Rosemary and me.
