Rosemary 1969

For anybody who may go further than looking at my blog photographs and perhaps read their content they might notice my constant reference to Argentine writer Jorge Luís Borges. Of late I keep repeating how he often wrote that first times are repeated as first times over and over. 

Photograph by Andrew Taylor 1968

Whenever I look at the framed portraits, etc. of my wife Rosemary I am instantly taken to the moment where she is facing my camera and I am about to press the shutter. This memory that Julian Barnes in his latest book Departure(s) [no idea why he has that s in brackets] calls IAM or Involuntary Autobiographical Memory is the pleasant but obsessive culprit.

IAM - Julian Barnes 

1968

Today Saturday I am a bit more cheerful as my ailing Niño seems to be recovering. I decided to go to my oficina and look at a large binder with most of the photographs I took of my family in Mexico. I was looking for some particular ones and they were not there. I have a two large metal drawers with files that I call Family. It was there were I found the first photographs I took of Rosemary and also the ones where my Yorkshire compadre Andrew Taylor took in colour of us with my Asahi Pentax S-3.

There were some colour negatives that I had not notice before of Rosemary and a nutty one taken by Andrew of the two of us. In one the photographs Rosemary is showing the beginning of that sad face she seemed to use when she posed for me. I wonder what she was thinking about to make her look sad?

Few people and even some photographers do not understand the intimacy involved in scanning these negatives and looking at them enlarged on a monitor. As you remove the embedded dust of years you see things you may not have noticed before. There was this colour negative (I was able to remove most of the yellow cast (age of picture?). What made me curious is that Rosemary had this little wooden cross around her neck. Some photographers my age might know that when you have an old negative you put your finger on the side of your nose and rub the grease on the negative. Scratches and most dust will disappear.

Before we were married I took her, around 20 December 1967, to meet my mother who lived in Veracruz. On Mocambo beach I found this little driftwood that looked like a cross. I immediately just put a metal ring in the back and made it a necklace.

With the wonders of a scanner, just a few minutes ago I printed the photograph, found the cross and scanned them together.

What a pleasure it is to combine the technology of the past century with that of this one.

The last two photographs feature the white bird dress that was Rosemary's wedding dress. Just a couple of days ago when I saw a photograph of a Mexican dress called a hupil I came to understand that her wedding dress is indeed a huipil. 

Turning into Lear

Falstaff 

Reading Solitude 

Imperfect Sympathies 

I have most of the books by Harold Bloom. He is not that easy to read. He is extremely learned and constantly uses words not in my vocabulary and writers and philosophers in my memory. My two favourite books of his are ? How to Read and Why?  and Shakespeare – The Invention of the Human. The latter book was the bible that Rosemary and I would read before going to a Shakespeare play at Christopher Gaze’s Bard on Beach. I was pleased, that like me, Gaze had Bloom’s book on his night table. And of course both of us know that Bloom’s favourite character in Shakespeare is Sir John Falstaff.

My current Bloom read is his Where Shall Wisdom be Found?  I chose to start at the end with Saint Augustine and Reading which contains a most elaborate and detailed review of Miguel Cervantes Saavedra’s Don Quijote de la Mancha. I have read that novel, a contemporary of Shakespeare, twice and I know that after this Bloom chapter I will have to read it again.

My grandmother often talked to me about San Agustín and in my Catholic boarding school of St. Edward’s in Austin I learned that while Agustín and Thomas Aquinas are both saints they are considered to be great philosophers.

It was in CBC Radio’s Ideas in a program dedicated to St. Augustine – Bishop of Hippo that I found out a little glimpse of the man’s philosophy. He stated that when you listened to music (atonal music was far in the horizon) you hear that first note, in the past, the second one in the present and (most important) the next note in the future.

Here is the fine excerpt from Bloom’s chapter on St. Augustine:

It is from Augustine that we learn to read, since he first established the relationship between reading and memory, though for him the purpose of reading was our conversion to Christ. Nevertheless, I read poetry aloud and seek to possess it by memory because of Augustine, and like Hamlet I set the will above the Word, in conscious defiance of Augustine. Shakespeare, in my judgement, invented the inner self, but only because Augustine had made it possible, by creating autobiographical memory (read Julian Barnes’s Departure(s) who writes exactly of that topic), in which one’s own life becomes the text. We think because we learn to remember our reading the best that can be read – for Augustine the Bible and Virgil, Cicero and the Neoplatonists,to which we have added  for ourselves Plato, Dante, Cervantes and Shakespeare, with Joyce and Proust in the century just past. But always remain in the progeny of Augustine, who first told us that the book alone could nourish thought, memory, and the intricate interplay of in the life of the mind. Reading alone will not save us or make us wise, but without it we will lapse into the death-in-life of the dumbing down in which America now leads the world,as in all other matters.

There are some words that to my ears are all music. Two of them are Arthurian and Borgesian. Somehow those two apply to my thoughts today.

My father, when I was a little boy, introduced me to the story of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. He told me of a magical sword, Excalibur, that only King Arthur could use. Many years later in 1990 I read Anthony Burgess’s novel Any Old Iron in which Excalibur magically appears in a St. Petersburg museum. Since then I have adopted that any camera that I own, when in my hands, is Excalibur, I cannot fail.

Jorge Luís Borges often writes that every first moment is repeated by subsequent first moments exactly like that first one. In 1969, When I had been married not quite a year to Rosemary, I had the idea of taking pictures of her nude (I was much too shy to shoot below the belt, waist!). I used an Asahi Pentax S-3 I had purchased used at Foto Rudiger on Avenida Venustiano Carranza in Mexico City. The camera was one year old, but already the black paint had rubbed off. I saw the underlying brass as beautiful.

That camera has always been in my thoughts. My compadre, Andrew Taylor, used it to photograph Rosemary and me in the University of Mexico’s cactus garden and by our blue VW Beetle inside the crater of the Nevado de Toluca.

By the time we arrived in Vancouver in 1975 I had purchased newer cameras and the Pentax ended up on a shelf. It was this last December the first, when I went to Mexico City to photograph blind 91 old photographer, Pedro Meyer that  I used the Pentax. I had the idea that I was taking it and me to our roots. The photographs were extremely sharp. The 50mm f-2 lens is superb. I was so inspired that a couple of weeks ago I used the Pentax again to photograph Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate, George Bowering. It seems obvious that my Pentax in my hand is Excalibur. 

Pedro Meyer 

George Bowering 

My Excalibur, a couple of years ago, had its shutter button fall out. This involved a complicated removing of the top cover of the camera. I took it to Horst Wenzel. He repaired it and two weeks later he fell and bled to death.

With all those thoughts today, I came up with the idea of scanning the Pentax with two negatives of Rosemary that I took in 1969.

I would say the result is both Arthurian and Borgesian.

That's the way the cookie crumbles

The phrase "It is what it is" was famously used by Donald Trump regarding COVID-19 deaths in a 2020 interview with British journalist Jonathan Swan for Axios on HBO. The, at times, tense, direct questioning style of British journalists has often defined their interviews with Trump.

A week ago a family member of mine used the above expression when I signalled my frustration in not being able to solve a family problem. The use of that expression can accompany others that are much in fashion in this century:

1. Thank you for sharing.

2.  Thank you for reaching out.

3. Protocol

It is now virtually impossible to talk to anybody on the phone. The protocol is that you must first text.

The latest answer to a phone call is about a woman who says something like, “What is your name and the purpose of your call? You give out your name and add, “friend”. The woman then asks you to wait while she goes to inquire if the person is available. Up to now in countless attempts with friends I get, “The person is not available.”

This is supposed to be the age of communication. A local journalist works for a weekly periodical and told me (it took him two weeks to get back on my email to him) that he has over 185,000 emails of which 90% he has not opened. He says he is overwhelmed. The reason for the many emails is that many periodicals in this city do not have a receptionist or a phone.

In that past century if you did not like something you might send a letter to a newspaper’s editor. But you would think of having to write it and then go to the post office and buy a stamp so in the end the letter would not be written. Now with social media you can vent your angry and nasty feelings immediately.

Finally I do contribute to Facebook and Twitter with links to my blogs. I have written 6,854 of them and I believe that most of them have that important word “content”. People then “react” and or leave one of those horrible (in my mind) emojis. They could write, “Nice photograph”, or good blog or anything else. Is using an emoji a form of communication?

I would like to remind these people that the first ever photograph in a newspaper happened in 1874 in a now defunct NY City newspaper. Before that date photographs could not appear anywhere except on gallery walls or as expensive photogravures as the author picture in a 19^th century book. When the halftone process (many dots) was created a photograph of the Steinway Building in New York City appeared in that newspaper. What is important is that the photograph appeared in an article that had copy (words).

Now it is almost impossible to communicate  by talking or writing.

What’s next in this age of communication?

Rosemary - 1969 present in our bedroom

 

Some people have family albums. They are probably folks who were born in that last century. Family pictures are now stored in phones. Many are lost when they malfunction.

I have those family albums because I am from that last century and I was born in 1942. I also have the first photograph I took in 1958 with my new Pentacon-F SLR purchased for $100 when I was in school in Austin, Texas.

I took my mother’s double advice – A house is not a home until framed pictures are on the wall. – Pictures framed are pictures saved.

Part of my portrait style is that I never (almost) photograph anybody smiling. I believe that a serious face looking into my lens reveals a bit of her/his essence.

This framed portrait of my Rosemary I took in Mexico City in 1969. I had no lights. I used an Asahi Pentax S-3 I had bought used in Mexico City. It was the first nude photograph I ever took. The framed photograph is cropped so not bits show.

An unanswered question I never asked (why is it that when we become curious the person that can answer it is dead?) is why she had this delicate sad face? Was she seeing her death 51 years later?

I often cite Jorge Luís Borges and particularly in relation to this portrait. He wrote often that first times become repeated first times. When look at this portrait from my bed (when lights are out I can imagine it ) it seems like I have just taken that photograph. What might have I instructed her to do? At that time we had little time. Was she worried about money?

Whatever the unanswered questions never asked, my Rosemary is in our bedroom gazing at our two cats and me.

Only another portrait photographer might understand the above.