7:45pm December 9 2020

While the jury may be out on how good a portrait photographer I may be, I believe that in taking pictures of hands I am the best.

Sometime around 1980 I proudly showed Rosemary an 8x10 portrait print that I was going to take to art director Rick Staehling at Vancouver Magazine. Rosemary said, “What is that little finger doing sticking out?” I don’t remember what I may have retorted. I was miffed.

I took the print and showed it (proudly) to Rick Staehling who immediately said, “What is that little finger doing sticking out?” I was not miffed. Rosemary was right.

Thanks to Rosemary I know how to photograph hands and that is what makes my portraits good to my liking and to others.

It is with tremendous sadness that I illustrate this blog with Rosemary’s hands shortly after she died at 7:40 on December 9, 2020.

On a rosier note I have here in Spanish (and my translation into English) a love poem by Argentine poet Alfonsina Storni. It was late December of 2021 and I was at the lobby of the Claridge Hotel in Buenos Aires. In my hand I was reading Alfonsina Storni’s love poems that I had purchased earlier that morning. I was on a wing chair facing the yellow elevator door. I kept looking at it hoping it would open and Rosemary would walk out and say, “Shall we walk on Calle Florida?”

It was while reading Storni’s book that I found myself falling in love with Rosemary all over again.

 I place my hands on my heart and I feel it is desperately beating.

-What do you want? - And he answers -: To tear you chest, spread wings, make holes in the walls, go through houses, fly, crazy, across the city, hollow its chest and join it.

Alfonsina Storni 

Liv Ullmann & her hands