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| Rosemary circa Mexico 1969/70 |
It is difficult for me to explain my thinking process when I look back at photographs I may have taken a long time ago. The ones here I shot in Mexico and environments around 1969/70. Rosemary and I had been married since February 8, 1968. The presence of Rosemary’s sister Ruth is the clincher. Laughingly I used to tell people that Ruth had been sent by her parents to find out if I ate with a fork and knife.
I have no idea where I took these photographs, particularly the lovely ones with the doorway.
These photographs, which were in a binder that I keep with most of my Mexico photographs, is part of my current project to discover pictures that never saw the light of day. In my computer I have a large file called Family where I place as many pictures as I can find. Is for posterity, perhaps? I have no idea if anybody will be interested in them. But there is a big but here.
I have a book which fascinated Rebecca when she was a little girl. I wrote about it here. When photography was in its early stages there were some people who thought that placing a camera next to a child that was dying would somehow capture the moment the soul left the body. They were wrong but the book conveys how in those early years of the 19th century children died in scores before they ever grew up. Sleeping Beauty
I see in these photographs something called the opposite. When I look at these two tight portraits of Rosemary I can feel her life spirit going into them. She was alive when I took the photographs. I may have given her instructions on how to pose. She is wonderfully alive in these.
And there is one more delightful detail. Sometime before I took these photographs I found a piece of small cross-shaped driftwood on Mocambo Beach in Veracruz where my mother lived. Rosemary and I often drove our VW to visit her. I inserted a little silver ring behind the little cross and through it a silver chain. Rosemary is wearing it here. And all these years later, I took it out of a jewellery box I keep in my office for the scan.
That first portrait here conveys something that Rosemary did often which I was never able to fully understand. How can someone smile and yet show sadness?
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| Rosemary with Sister Ruth |
