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| Alexandra - 1997 |
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| Filomena Cristeta de Irureta Goyena Hayward - 1970 |
I disagree with Captain Beefheart’s lyric from Ashtray Hearts -Somebody’s had too much to think. Living alone with two brother and sister cats, and having as the only obligations to feed them and tidy up the house, leaves me with lots of time to think.
From my bed I can see the portrait of my eldest daughter wearing my mother’s silk blue Mandarin coat given to her by her old flame in Manila in the mid 30s.
Thinking about the portrait and knowing that my mother wrote a poem about that coat it occurred to me that as a portrait photographer many of my memories are based on photographs from my family album and then of all those countless photographs I have taken of the family for so many years.
I ask myself, “Is a memory based on a photograph, particularly one that I took, any different from those who rarely took any pictures or none at all? Is my memory of a person sharp like a photograph?
And when I think, as an example, of my father, is that image one from our family album? When I was in Buenos Aires in 1965 I would visit my father on weekends. I have no memory of what we talked about. My memory of those three months pop in my head as a portrait I took of him with his friends on Carabobo Street leaning on a Morris Oxford.
Does that make me different? What would Captain Beefheart say?
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| Captain Beefheart |
