Rosa 'Ketchup & Mustard' 23 August 2025

Because I was raised in a house with a garden in Buenos Aires, gardens and plants connect me with my memories.

It was around 1950 in Buenos Aires, when I was 8 that I distinctly remember my mother telling Mercedes, our live-in housekeeper, to go to the corner store to buy something called “catsup”. I do not remember why it was my mother needed that condiment. I have loved ketchup since. Especially so as when I was going to a Roman Catholic boarding school in Austin, Texas, St. Edward’s High School, in 1958, we were served Korean war surplus powdered eggs for breakfast. They were runny and terrible. We all slathered them with ketchup. To this day I am unable to enjoy good scrambled eggs without lots of ketchup.

Of mustard have this indelible memory when was 8 or 9 of being in my uncle’s home in Acasuso in Buenos Aires. Uncle Harry Hayward, was making Colman’s Mustard. I watched how he was putting some sugar into the mustard powder. I love Colman’s and I when I prepare it I always use Uncle Harry’s method.

All the above happened in my mind when I cut three blooms of my best new rose, Rosa ‘Ketchup & Mustard’ today.

Rosemary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward - 1968 - Mexico City

 

It is easy to boast about being good at something. It is much better to acknowledge the influence of mentors, friends, pushy magazine art directors and studying other photographers and artists from the past.

And then there are other reasons why I think I am one of the best portrait photographers in Canada. One of them is in the photograph illustrating this blog.

I am not sure if I was yet married to my Rosemary or we were just married. I took this photograph in the apartment of a very good friend who lived on Calle Herodoto in Mexico City. He had a loft and to get to it there was a lovely wooden spiral staircase (I can still imagine its scent). Rosemary and I lived in that loft for a while (unmarried!). My friend, Raúl Guerrero Montemayor had taught me the Berlitz method of teaching English and had me teaching at a school where I was sent out to American companies that had Mexican executives that needed to learn English. It was in that school that I noticed Rosemary around December 15, 1967 and we were married February 8, 1968.

According to my negatives of this session, I used Ilford HP-5 film. I must have used a terrible developer as it is very grainy. For the photograph I used an Asahi Pentax S-3 with a 80mm Komura lens.

In this century there are so many words that are overused to the point that I avoid them like the plague. One of them is “iconic”.

This portrait of Rosemary, who through the years did wonderful stuff with the hair, has something soft, graceful, elegant and (yes!) feminine.

I soundly believe that If I am indeed a good portrait photographer is started with my facing my wife. My only regret is that while I have quite a few portraits of her, I should have taken many more

Rosemary - circa1969

As I get fewer phone calls for people who want to be photographed by this old man I have been enjoying the technique of going through my film negatives (no layers work for digital pictures!) and scanning two by putting one on top of the other. These scanner negative sandwiches without mayonnaise work best when you use photographs from a same session.

Today I decided to go close to home. I have a large binder with my negatives (colour and b+w) beginning in the early 60s in Argentina and principally then from 1967 onward photographs of the family. I saw these two of Rosemary wearing one of the many lovely Mexican dresses she had. The sandwich may not be all that flattering but it does convey that Rosemary was always full of enthusiasm and a sense of wonder about our life together.

For those who might wonder on the how here are my tips. People constantly tell me that my portraits have great eyes. With my 22-year-old Photoshop 8 I lighten the whites of the eyes. This particular negative has suffered through the years as I took it around 1969. The colour shift is extreme.  To remove the yellow/red cast I added cyan and blue. I also desaturated the colour to make it less intense.

And there it is.

Cheri

 

In that past century the initials RHIP were understood by anybody. It meant “rank has its privileges”. My life as a photographer has given me plenty of that.

In the late 70s I was perhaps the only man in Vancouver allowed to take photographs in the hotel dressing rooms where our marvellous ecdysiasts danced. I was a fan of ecdysiasts and many of them became my trusted friends who allowed this bungler to learn his craft of taking portraits, etc.

One of them, Cheri had a face that for me is pure Gioconda Gheradini. Her enigmatic expression assured me that had I played strip poker with her I would have lost all of my clothes.

My RHIP status means that tomorrow I am being invited to attend an ecdysiast reunion. I will see after many years some old friends.

Former Vancouver Magazine editor Malcolm Parry would say that I will have a privileged position.

Dahlia hybrida 'Hypnotic White' 22 August 2025

 

Nothing Gold Can Stay - Robert Frost

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

In Victorian times the dahlia represented devotion, love, beauty and dignity. Those four words and this dahlia define my Rosemary. Today I had little to do and I was a bit melancholic in the garden as few roses were in bloom.  I went to the back garden on our lane and there were those dahlias. Rosemary when I first met her was not too fond of yellow. She began to like it as soon as I brought home one day a single yellow tea rose called Mrs. Oakley Fisher.

I see in this particular dahlia, the older one all yellow and the newer ones with a yellow center as two versions of my Rosemary.