Wednesday, April 01, 2026

Brother Dunstan Bowles, C.S.C.

 

 

Tonight with my insomnia it is almost April 2 but I will begin this blog in the last quarter hour of the first.

I want to write here how the Brothers of Holy Cross (the same as in Indiana’s Notre Dame University) seem to keep me feeding myself from that almost full jar that is my life. Brother Dunstan Bowles, C.S.C. taught me English Literature in 1960. How can it be that 76 years later I remembered T.S. Eliott’s Wasteland’s connection with April?

Knowledge from my past and reading tough non-fiction now is giving me a reason to not give up and simply wait to die at my age of 83.  I am not sure if Brother Dunstan told us about the frequent presence of Latin in Wasteland.  Latin was never my forte in my Roman Catholic high school. I decided to switch to Spanish as for this would be a breeze since I was born in Argentina and my Spanish was and is very good. How would I know that taking Spanish with Brother Anton Mattingly,C.S.C. was not going to be exactly a breeze and that to this day my Spanish grammar is extremely good thanks to him?

I can only feel lucky that I had these Brothers as teachers for four years and that one of them, Brother Edwin Reggio got to know my wife Rosemary and our two granddaughters Rebecca & Lauren. And because of my curious habit of associating stuff with stuff that may have no evident connection I believe I will be taking out  Sylvia Plath's Bell Jar for a re-read.

 

THE WASTE LAND – T.S. Eliot -1922

 “Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi

in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβνλλα τί ϴέλεις; respondebat illa: άπο ϴανεΐν ϴέλω.”

For Ezra Pound

il miglior fabbro.

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Winter kept us warm, covering5

Earth in forgetful snow, feeding

A little life with dried tubers.

Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee

With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,

And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,10

And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.

Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.

And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,

My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,

And I was frightened. He said, Marie,15

Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.

In the mountains, there you feel free.

I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

 

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,20

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,23

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock,25

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.30

Frisch weht der Wind

 

31

Der Heimat zu,

 

Mein Irisch Kind

 

Wo weilest du?

 

“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago,35

“They called me the hyacinth girl.”

—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,40

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.

Oed’ und leer das Meer.

42

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,

 

Had a bad cold, nevertheless

Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,45

With a wicked pack of cards. Here, said she,46

Is your card, the drowned Phoenician Sailor,

(Those are pearls that were his eyes. Look!)

Here is Belladonna, the Lady of the Rocks,

The lady of situations.50

Here is the man with three staves, and here the Wheel,

And here is the one-eyed merchant, and this card,

Which is blank, is something he carries on his back,

Which I am forbidden to see. I do not find

The Hanged Man. Fear death by water.55

I see crowds of people, walking round in a ring.

Thank you. If you see dear Mrs. Equitone,

Tell her I bring the horoscope myself:

One must be so careful these days.

Unreal City,

 

60

Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,

A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,

I had not thought death had undone so many.63

Sighs, short and infrequent, were exhaled,64

And each man fixed his eyes before his feet.65

Flowed up the hill and down King William Street,

To where Saint Mary Woolnoth kept the hours

With a dead sound on the final stroke of nine.68

There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying, “Stetson!

“You who were with me in the ships at Mylae!70

“That corpse you planted last year in your garden,

“Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?

“Or has the sudden frost disturbed its bed?

“Oh keep the Dog far hence, that's friend to men,74

“Or with his nails he'll dig it up again!75

“You! hypocrite lecteur!—mon semblable,—mon frère!”

76

Monday, March 30, 2026

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.

Sunday, March 29, 2026

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.

Saturday, March 28, 2026

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.