Guanajuato, Mexico circa 1975

Lost & Found
 

In the other blog today I wrote about having lost what some would call my signature shot. Now this evening I have looked at the negatives that were lost for a long time and found this one which I shot immediately after that first one. I don't think this one makes the grade and particularly because of the bit of wall on the right hand side. Just to show that one has to take advantage of decisive moments

Guanajuato - Mexico circa 1975

Photographers have an advantage over artists who paint. I cannot understand how those artists survive the fact that they no longer have the painting they sold. We photographers even though some of us are artists (people tell me I am one) keep that original negative, transparency or digital file.

So when a photographer loses a cherished negative, slide or digital file it can be a tragedy.

When we arrived in Vancouver from Mexico City in 1975 I was not able to get a photo job until the new French CBC TV station hired me in 1976/77. By 1978 I was gainfully shooting photographs for Vancouver Magazine. I believe that it was around 1979 that I decided to have a show of my Mexican photographs. In those days restaurants welcomed framed photographs. I had a show in a nearby restaurant to Vancouver Magazine which was on Richards and Davie. One of the framed photographs is what my Victoria friend Gerry Schallie would call it a signature shot.

I took the photograph from the steps of the University of Guanajuato. I was able to shoot it immediately when I saw the man because I knew the sunny 16 rule. I shot it with KodakTri-X at 1/1000 at f-11. My camera was an Asahi Pentax S-3. The lens was a Komura 85mm F-1.8.

Until today I can say I lost that negative. Today in my family files under Mexico before 1975 I found it and what you see here is scan that I did today.

I will never understand Canadians who flock to Porto Vallehrtah (that’s how they pronounce it) to enjoy a beach with margaritas when there are so many lovely cities with culture, etc.

I am joyfull today and I believe this may spur me to return to Guanajuato and take some street photographs.

Palm Sunday - Coyoacán - 1962

I met my Rosemary in Mexico City on December 15^th, 1967.  We were married on February 8, 1968.  We would have been married at least a week before but every time we tried it the judge said he was not authorized as I was an Argentine but Mexican resident while Rosemary was a Canadian tourist. Finally when we were married my mother was not there. She lived in Veracruz and she had travelled for our previous attempts.

The solution was for me to go to the lovely Coyoacán neighbourhood with a bottle of good French cognac and I bribed a judge who had his office in the city square. Since then Coyoacán has been a happy place in my heart

Coyoacán was always an attraction for me. In 1962 when I was just starting to shoot street photographs I had taken a photograph at the door of the main church in the Coyoacán zócalo. What is interesting about the photograph is that if you look on one of the corners you will see the points of a palm. I took it on Palm Sunday.

Without revealing my now true spiritual beliefs, I can state that my religious grandmother inculcated me on the meanings of Roman Catholic doctrine. As a young boy these beliefs were stabilizing. Years later when I was 16 who could have predicted the lightness in my mind after going to confession? Confession with a priest was like going to a psychologist and not paying a cent.

I will never forget that a few days after Time Magazine’s Is God Dead cover on April 6, 1966 I was sitting in the Buenos Aires Zoo reading it by the tiger cage. I was wearing my summer whites Argentine Navy uniform because some Admirals had yet to decide if it was much too cold to change us to the blue uniform. Had I lingered a while I might have run into Jorge Luís Borges who loved tigers as much as I did and would often sit on the very bench I was sitting.

Perhaps my world of comfort died that day that God died.

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 noticed 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. 

Rosemary circa 1971

Of late I have been re-reading the short stories of the Ukraine-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector. She was a beautiful woman who objected to be told that she and her writing resembled that of Virginia Woolf. Because we live in an anglo-centric part of North America, feminist writers like Lispector, Argentines, Alfonsina Storni & Alejandra Pizarnic, and the Mexican surrealist Elena Garro are not well known.

It is impossible for me to explain my daily life in which I miss the woman of my life who died five years ago, my Rosemary.

Lispector defined her isolation:

Con el tiempo, sobre todo en los últimos años, he perdido la capacidad de ser persona. Ya no sé como se hace. Y una forma nueva de la soledad “soledad de no pertenecer” ha empezado a invadirme como la hiedra de un muro.

With time, especially in these last years, I have lost the capacity of being a person. I no longer know how to do it. And a new form of solitude “solitude of not belonging” has b begun to invade me like ivy on a wall.

 This solitude of not belonging I expand by saying that I no longer feel useful. At the very least I am useful to my cats Niño and Niña and I will be useful to my two daughters and two granddaughters when I am dead. They will inherit lots of cash and a lovely Kitsilano duplex where everything works.

As I stare of the photograph of Rosemary on my bedroom wall that has her signature sad eyes look I have been overwhelmed by my stupidity in not having taken more photographs of her. For years I photographed ecdysiasts and other women mostly unclothed in my pursuit of the erotic.

The erotic was facing me every day at home. How can one equate being in a tub with Rosemary with our toes doing stuff, with anything else I might have found in my photographs?

It is the usual, when one understands the person with whom I could share that knowledge is sadly gone.

At the very least I find photographs of Rosemary that delight me that I have never printed or scanned. This one I might have taken in Mexico City around 1971.

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.