Cliff Robertson & Neil Armstrong

Of Memory - Jorge Luís Borges

It is in my memory and when I listen to Cortázar videos I find his voice familiar. Now in this 21^st century when we are bombarded with photographs of Marilyn Monroe or pictures of Cary Grant when he was a little boy next to one before he died I wonder what makes upt what we call memory.

Jorge Luís Borges liked to use a lovely word in Spanish rememorar. It is far nicer than the ordinary word to remember – acordar. There is an idea to me of going into our mind in search of those moments that so affected our life as it was to become.

This idea of remembering may have an odd variant. What of the portrait photographer who has countless framed pictures of the family on the walls of my Kits home?

When I remember my father I mostly remember incidents when I was with him as I have few photographs of him. When I went to Argentina in 1966 to do my military service in the Argentine Navy I also had the intention of finding my father whom we (my mother and grandmother) left in 1953 for Mexico City. I found him and for about 6 months I would visit him on weekends. For reasons I cannot understand I have no memory of our conversations.

My father George Waterhouse-Hayward

And so when I think of my Rosemary I think of moments we shared and places we visited together. Her voice is beginning to fade but her face in my memory varies according to the event and the year. I remember her as when I first met her, I remember her on our bed dying.

So again I want to find out if the constant barrage of images is affecting how people remember now? That first landing on the moon is ingrained in my mind. Rosemary and I watched it on TV. As soon as the astronaut:

At 02:56 GMT on 21 July 1969, American astronaut Neil Armstrong became the first person to walk on the Moon. He stepped out of the Apollo 11 lunar module and onto the Moon's surface, in an area called the 'Sea of Tranquility.

As soon as he stepped, we turned of the TV and went to see Charly the film with Cliff Robertson.

In that memory, in my mind is the image of that actor. I photographed him.