Rosenary Elizabeth Healey Waterhouse-Hayward - 1969

 

La muerte me ha golpeado en lo que más amaba, y no he sido capaz de levantarme y devolverle el golpe con el mero acto de volver a vivir.

~ Julio Cortázar

Death has struck me it that which I loved the most, and I have not been capable of picking myself up and return that strike with the mere act of returning to live. My translation

This is my 7000^th blog and some sort of a milestone. I knew days ago that I had to write something a bit out of the ordinary. But all thoughts ended up in knowing I had to write about my loss of Rosemary. She did die on 9 December 2020, but as days pass it seems that for me my feelings of loss are worse today.

It may have to do that I am living alone with a female cat surrounded by tactile memories of her. Niña was her cat and her hands stroked her often.

What makes my situation worse is that with no prospect of work (and no need for it as there is plenty of money in the bank) I live a life in which I feel that my utility to my world is gone. I can really state that what keeps me alive is the knowledge that should I die before Niña, there would be nobody to take care of her.

There is a special fate that few that I know understand. This is that my home is filled with framed portraits of Rosemary on the walls and when I look at them, she is looking back at me as I always wanted eye contact with my subjects and family. She is looking at me with her sad eyes. I know that in our 52 year marriage she gave me stability, attention and love.

I no longer miss the sex. I miss those quiet moments in bed when I could hear her breathing. Come morning, our breakfasts in bed (25 years of them) were the best moments of our lives.

I will soon meet my oblivion and once there I will have not feelings or memories for her. Death may have one advantage in the end.

CP Train Station - 7 August 2026

 

Because I am a product of the last century and a photographer from it I have always considered that the Holy Grail of photography is a personal style that can be identified. That last century was of the Irving Penns, Richard Avedons, Philippe Halsmans and only Annie Leibovitz is a survivor.

7 August 2026

The flavour of the month and of many years leading up to this one has been street photography. Because Henri Cartier-Bresson was a pioneer who lived many years in Paris and went to cafés his b+w photographs are instantly recognizable. Of late Vivien Meirs is in ascendance. For people under 30 Dorothea Lange may be an unknown.

7 August 2026

Street photography is the norm because most people now carry that ubiquitous camera that is the cellular phone. I think there is another reason. Post covid pandemic has made people less willing to talk face to face or answer the phone. It is far safer to press the button on you cell phone camera from across the street or to make believe you are looking at it when you press take.

I have always been a portrait photographer and part of the pleasure in being one is to address the person you are going to photograph. But you cannot be a “one trick pony” so I shoot street photographs in Mexico and Argentina (landscapes there, too) but try not to shoot sunsets. I scan my plants, which while it is not photography is it a form of making images.

Because I print lots I had to go to Opus downtown to buy 81/2 by 11 inch plastic sleeves for my prints. Opus on Granville Island had run out.

I decided to take my Fuji X-E3 camera. I took 3 photographs. One of them was for a purpose.

It was when I was a little boy that my grandmother told me that at around 1918 she and her two daughters and son travelled to the Bronx from Manila. I remember how she told me (in Spanish), “We disembarked from our Japanese boat in a place that had mountains and forests. It was called Vancooover.” We went to a large train station and from there we took a train to Montreal and from there to NY City.

In my recent past when I happened to be downtown (I avoid it now) I liked to to the CP Train Station and sit on a bench (most gone now) and imagine my family walking across it.

The panoramic was a shock for me as that cruise liner is huge. It is almost like a floating first class hotel.

The third shot when I saw it I had to go around the block. Am I a street photographer?

No.

Rosemary and her cat Casi-Casi

This blog is 6998. I am already thinking what I will write for the700th.

Because I was in the Argentine Navy as a conscript I like to use nautical terms when I think or talk. There is a fine one in Spanish - a la deriva which translates most disappointingly in English as drifting. The original meaning of l a la deriva – in Spanish is about a ship without a working rudder or with a broken engine. In my Spanish it also has a most important meaning of a person, institution or nation that is drifting without purpose in a confusing state of mind.

At my soon to be 86 I am at –la deriva. I have a sort of easy daily routine that involves feeding my cat Niña, riding my bike, scanning my plants, taking photographs and writing these blogs.

The Spanish language has been bombarded by anglicismos – blog, internet, googliar, whatsappiar,etc.

I like to point out that we have a lovely word for blog in Spanish. It is – bitácora – which means a ship’s log. It is a finer sounding word than the noun but also verb blog.

I started this blog when I had my webpage (alexwaterhousehayward.com) designed in January 2006. I have no recollection who suggested I add a blog to it. I had no idea what a blog was. It took me a few years to figure out it was almost a – Dear Diary.

One aspect of my blog that I did not count on, as I was ignorant, is that my blog is Blogger and Blogger is Google. Because of my many blogs my internet presence is very large and I get requests (good money) for use of my photographs in magazines, newspapers, etc.

Because my memory is fading, if I want to find out in what year I went with Rosemary to Venice or photographed some famous (or not famous) person, I just go to my blog search engine or Google.

While I am rudderless with most of my creative and shared life with my Rosemary, writing this blog somehow ameliorates my confused (Rosemary purposely pronounced that con-few-zed) melancholy.

These three framed photographs of my Rosemary are on my dining room credenza. At least in one of them Rosemary has a nice smile without those sad eyes that were her trademark.

In Emily Dickinson's poetry, physical feet and metrical "feet" (the rhythmic units of a line) merge. She uses feet to explore physical movement, time passing, death, and the internal dance of her own creative mind without formal instruction.

I could not prove the Years had feet – Emily Dickinson

563

I could not prove the Years had feet—

Yet confident they run

Am I, from symptoms that are past

And Series that are done—

I find my feet have further Goals—

I smile upon the Aims

That felt so ample—Yesterday—

Today's—have vaster claims—

I do not doubt the self I was

Was competent to me—

But something awkward in the fit—

Proves that—outgrown—I see—

Since I was a child my mother would tell me that not only had I inherited her very nice legs but also her feet. Until now I can buy shoes that fit perfectly so I have no bunions.

Sometime in the beginning of this century a woman at the Exposure Gallery (a photographic gallery sadly gone) asked me if I had ever photographed feet. I quickly answered that I thought feet were ugly. With a smile she said, “That’s a challenge.” At the gallery I met a beautiful woman who was a jeweller. I wrote about her recently here.

Her Infinite Variety

After that first session we went to Lynn Canyon where I took portraits of her on the water, and yes, her feet.

Because all my negatives are nicely filed I could have re-scanned the negs and put those here. I decided to go to my darkroom roots so I scanned the prints in Fiedler’s files. The first one was badly overexposed (badly printed in fact) and when I corrected I loved all the interesting flaws that have appeared.

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale Her infinite variety: other women cloy The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry Where most she satisfies" Antony and Cleopatra (Act II, Scene II) William Shakespeare

As the portrait photographer that I am I can assert that hundreds of persons have faced my camera since I started taking photographs in Austin, Texas in 1959. As inspiration, I had all the family albums that my mother kept and often showed me.

It is difficult to figure out (unless you quote Shakespeare) the infinite variety that two eyes, one nose, one mouth and two ears are able to display.

This last month, with the use of my newish 28 inch wide Acer monitor, I have been exploring my many files. I am now standardizing their names as some of them have their first name and others their surname. I am now using surname followed by a comma and the first name.

I will be buying exterior hard drives and will be transferring those files, so should my computer do what so many computers eventually do, they will be in a safe place.

Because of my advanced age, I find myself meticulously fine tuning these file images. Some had dust I did not see the first time, others need more contrast or to be darker. When I am gone, these files will be some sort of legacy.

Best of all I am finding with the help of the wide screen, gems that I overlooked with my old Dell CRT monitor.

Case in point for today’s blog are some photographs of jeweller Susan Fiedler. My files (no digital pictures) are in envelopes with no date. I must have taken these in the beginning of this century. I met her at an exhibition at the Exposure Gallery, a photo gallery now sadly gone.

Because I was subjected to pushy magazine art directors and editors to do stuff differently (I am the photographer that I am today because of them), I discovered in Fiedler’s file some photographs that I have no idea how I did them. If asked I doubt I could repeat the look.

As for Susan Fiedler, when she faced my camera, she was my Cleopatra.

Siouxsie Sioux - Commodore Ballroom - October 8 1981

Fishnet Stockings –History l Wikipedia

During the 1920s, fishnets emerged as a more alternative trend in the U.S. and were favoured by women like showgirls, in large part due to the fact that fishnets were more revealing than typical regular stockings of the day.

Fishnets later emerged as an eminent fashion staple in the post-war pin-up and print-porn world with models like Bettie Page, Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe frequently appearing in fishnets.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the punk counterculture's fashion aesthetic included fishnets, often worn extra torn up with huge holes on the stockings or shredded up, as a reference to BDSM subculture.

Somehow I never ever bought my Rosemary fishnet stockings.  We liked to share shopping for clothing and shoes together. In fact I was the one who took my daughters when they were at that age to Simpson Sears to buy their first bras. Choosing dresses, tops and shoes for Rosemary was for me the pleasure of at last being able to play with dolls and to dress them. In that other century it was verboten for boys to play with dolls. Our only option were toy soldiers.

I have no idea why Rosemary never wore fishnets. Perhaps she knew that her legs were beautiful enough (competed with those of my mother) and did not need them. I cannot remember if Rosemary ever wore anything black. She was not Goth.

Perhaps because I am an old man I am still stuck with the idea of gentle, graceful femininity as I wrote here: Woman you are the reason for my existence

One of the photographs here a sort of closeup of a female body with fishnets I discovered today as I was looking into my many files with my fabulous 38inch wide Acer Monitor. With the smaller CRT Dell monitor I had it passed me by,

Hosta 'Midas Touch ' 2 August 2026

From kindergarten until 1956 I drew and painted. In a 1955 Mexico City my mother entered me for painting classes with English artist Robin Bond (he had been an expert on camouflage in WWII). I invariably arrived home with paint in all my clothing. It all stopped when I told my mother I did not want to paint anymore. She became very angry and would have spanked me had I been younger (I was 13). My artistic activities had to wait until 1959 when I purchased a Pentacon-F SLR in 1956 when I was at a boarding school in Austin, Texas.

In 1962 while going to Mexico City College my friend Roberto Hijar, who was getting a MFA in the art department, convinced me to go with him in the middle of the night to the school darkroom. He taught me to process film and to make prints. I was hooked even though the darkroom was unventilated.

By the time I returned from my military service in Buenos Aires in 1967 I managed to have some sort of darkroom (all unventilated). Until 1975 in our Mexico City home in Arboledas, Estado de México, my darkroom was a bathroom. When we moved to Vancouver in 1975, in our Burnaby home, I had a darkroom that had a bathroom that was separate. The same occurred when we moved to Kerrisdale. Nine years ago when we moved to Kitsilano I no longer had a darkroom and I learned to print in my perfectly ventilated and comfortable oficina.

I have been giving a thought to the idea of dirty art and clean art. My friend designer (now retired) Ian Bateson, was one of the best editorial illustrators in Vancouver. He used an elaborate and painstakingly complicated pointillistic style.

Suddenly to me, he discovered something called Procreate using his iPad. I could not understand how something could be easy (to my eye) and clean.

I have now seen the light.

By 2001 I was using an Epson scanner to scan my garden plants. It was easy, clean and fun. But I could not print them in my then conventional darkroom. That had to wait until we moved to Kitsilano 9 years ago and I bought a Canon printer and then an Epson.

Working in my nicely ventilated and lit oficina what I was doing was clean and almost easy. Could it still be seen as art?

I now see Bateson’s Procreate work with far more respect.

I wonder what my former teacher, Robin Bond (now dead) would think of clean art?

In that last century I fell hard when I first saw my Rosemary in Mexico City ion 15 December 1967. We were married on February 8, 1968. She was lovely and feminine but she was ahead of her time in making decisions. One of my most pleasant activities was to go with her shopping for her shoes. Most often she agreed on my choices. The same happened with dresses and tops. At long last(!) I was able to do what was not seen as normal in that psdy century which was to dress a doll.

By the time we arrived in Vancouver in 1975 and I became a portrait photographer I had the delight of taking photographs of many women, not only my daughters and eventually my granddaughters. I photographed women with beautiful faces and voluptuous bodies. From the very beginning, thanks to my upbringing (mother and grandmother), I always did my best to show respect in my womanly portraits. One rule I practiced wes that the only type of touching permitted was to move a little stray lock of hair with my little finger.

When I studied philosophy at Mexico City College from 1962 to 1963, I had a teacher, Ramón Xirau Subías, who converted me to Platonism. The idea of a perfect essence in a world of ideas as compared to the imperfections of our real world had me looking for the essence (soul) of the people I photographed. I rarely asked them to smile. To me the smiling hides that inner self I want to find and expose.

Today August 2, 2026 I can assert without question that I met two women who had that absolute essence of being a woman. One was my now gone wife, Rosemary, and the other is my friend Tarren. I met her around 1979 and I have photographed her off and on since then.

The pictures of Tarren here are all from one session when I first attempted to use leaves from my hostas with a person. Looking at them again I can see that perfection that a woman can be.

Mexican composer Agustín Lara's Mujer (Woman) has to be the best song ever composed to honour what a woman is.

Mujer – Agustín Lara

Woman, divine woman,

Mujer, mujer divina,

You have the poison that fascinates

Tienes el veneno que fascina

In your look.

En tu mirar.

Woman, alabastrine,

Mujer, alabastrina,

You are a passionate sonatina vibration.

Eres vibración de sonatina pasional.

You have the perfume of an orange tree in blossom,

Tienes el perfume de un naranjo en flor,

The haughty bearing of a majesty.

El altivo porte de una majestad.

Do you know about the filters that exist in love?

Sabes de los filtros que hay en el amor

You have the spell of lightness.

Tienes el hechizo de la liviandad.

The divine magic of a sunset

La divina magia de un atardecer

And the wonder of inspiration.

Y la maravilla de la inspiración.

You have in the rhythm of your being

Tienes en el ritmo de tu ser

All the beat of a song,

Todo el palpitar de una canción,

You are the reason for my existence, woman.

Eres la razón de mi existir, mujer.

The divine magic of a sunset

La divina magia de un atardecer

And the wonder of inspiration.

Y la maravilla de la inspiración.

You have in the rhythm of your being

Tienes en el ritmo de tu ser

All the beat of a song,

Todo el palpitar de una canción,

You are the reason for my existence, woman.

Eres la razón de mi existir, mujer.