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| 3pm, 31 August 2022 |
According to my Mappin & Webb birth spoon, given to me by
my Aunt Inez Barber, I was born ten to three in the morning of the 31st of
August of 1942.
My birth was recorded by a photographer with a magnesium flash. I knew then and there that someday I would be a photographer.
My mother told me that my father forgot to register my birth with the authorities. By the time he went it was April 18, 1943. That is the date on all my documents including my birth certificate.
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| With Auntie Inez in Buenos Aires - 1942 |
I was born in the Sanatorio Anchorena which is now housed in a modern building in downtown Buenos Aires.
Eighty years later to that 1942 date, I have followed a
personal custom of taking a self-portrait. This one is old-fashioned-elaborate
because I used a film camera, a Mamiya RB-67 Pro SD loaded with the now
discontinued Fuji Instant B&W film
FP 3000B. I fired the camera with a rubber bulb.
What you see here is not the print but the scanned negative that I reversed in Photoshop.
Tonight I am having a birthday dinner, to not only celebrate mine, but also my eldest daughter Alexandra’s who was 54 on the 27th. Present will be my other daughter Hilary and her two daughters Lauren and Rebecca. We will be enjoying a meal at the Italian restaurant in the Italian Cultural Centre.
I am a tad disappointed that I will not be able to bring Niña and Niño to enjoy the repast.
The best birthday gift that I have received today was a rendezvous lunch (that is the word he used) with Malcolm Parry at the Princeton Pub. He is really the reason why it was that I had a magazine photographic career.
I am not as thin as he is but he was wearing shorts and will be 86 in October. His memory is remarkable so we had a lovely time.
There were a couple of men in a nearby table who informed Mac that he was heading in the wrong direction as he was walking to the women’s facilities. While he was gone, I asked the two gentlemen if by any chance they were dock workers. They told me that they had been but were now retired. I then asked them if they knew Randy Rampage. Both looked at me with delight and answered in the affirmative.
All in all this birthday without my Rosemary promises to be one that is not all that bad.
And as per usual when I am going somewhere where Hilary will be I always dress in my favourite T-shirt of her crying when she was a baby. That is the T in today's self-portrait.
