Architectural Physiognomy
Tuesday, January 22, 2013
Sometime around 1967 I visited my friend Robert Hijar in San Francisco. It was during the middle of the Hippie era in the Haight-Ashbury district folks, you didn’t know and had never seen before, would sit at a table with you and ask you if you were happy.
I was not.
I had just returned from a two year stint in the Argentine Navy and I had no idea of what I was going to do with my future. I was 25 and had not finished my engineering degree. I had been short circuited by the induction-resistance-impedance-capacitance that was the mystery of electricity.
One day I took a cable car to Fisherman’s Warf and somewhere where the cable car began to go down a hill many young people stepped off. They seemed eager and happy. I asked them where they were going. They told me they attended the San Francisco Art Institute on Chestnut Street which was where the cable car had stopped. I followed. It was a beautiful school and I asked one of the students what he was studying. He told me, “I am getting a Fine Arts degree in Photography.” It was only then that I understood that photography was a career.
One day I took a cable car to Fisherman’s Warf and somewhere where the cable car began to go down a hill many young people stepped off. They seemed eager and happy. I asked them where they were going. They told me they attended the San Francisco Art Institute on Chestnut Street which was where the cable car had stopped. I followed. It was a beautiful school and I asked one of the students what he was studying. He told me, “I am getting a Fine Arts degree in Photography.” It was only then that I understood that photography was a career.
Years before I had made the usual list: doctor, lawyer, architect, teacher and engineer. I eliminated all as possible careers. Feeling guilty I opted for the last one to which I was ultimately going to fail. Later on I was to become a teacher, a profession I had eliminated from my list.
To this day I wonder what would have happened if I had known of the existence of the San Francisco School of Art. Would I be today teaching at Emily Carr University of Art & Design fully qualified with a Masters of Art in Photography? Probably not. Had I stayed in San Francisco I would have never then immediately returned to Mexico City. I would have not met my Rosemary, the beautiful blonde Canadian who would ultimately convince me to move to Vancouver.
In 1962 I took the picture you see here in a church somewhere in the outskirts of Mexico City. I shot it with a Pentacon-F, a 50mm lens and with Kodak Tri-X film. That negative lay buried amongst others and I did not notice it until today when I scanned it and uploaded it here. If anything in the wonderful and magical parlance of photography, that image probably process with much excitement the very day I took it was in latency (not entirely correct as latency is the image in a negative or slide that is unprocessed) until today.
Obviously my architectural shot was an experiment in a direction that I had yet to take. It was quite a few years later when I became much more interested in human physiognomy.
With this old picture finally making its appearance not as the traditional darkroom print (had I initially noticed it I might have in 1962) I can only state that I am glad I never went to that art school in San Francisco. I became a photographer. And I have no regrets.
