Ya no compartirás la clara luna ni los lentos jardines. Ya no hay una luna que no sea espejo del pasado, cristal de soledad, sol de agonías. Adiós las mutuas manos y las sienes que acercaba el amor. Hoy sólo tienes la fiel memoria y los desiertos días. Jorge Luís Borges

You will no longer share the clear moon nor the slow gardens. There is not moon that is not a mirror of the past, a glass of solitude, a sun of agonies. Goodbye to the mutual hand and the foreheads that love brought close. Today you only have the faithful memory and the desert days. My translation.

When I was 8 my mother took me to an open casket wake of the young son of our neighbours who crashed his Vespa at a level train crossing. All I could see was a bandaged head and a pair of hands held together. I then understood that death and those who won the lottery were always neighbours and never us.

By the time I was 21, I buried my father. In 1972, my mother died in Rosemary’s and my presence. Death then became a personal exposure to my inevitable one.

When Rosemary died on December 2020 she and I knew we would never meet again. This is something we knew deep inside. It is one of the reasons why my grief will not go away.

At the same time this idea of the inevitability of death was somehow softened, for both of us, by the fact we had lived in Mexico for 8 years. Mexicans talk about death and even make fun of it.

A year before my friend Abraham Rogatnick died (he told me he was going to pull the plug on his prostate cancer treatment) he gave me his Mexican papier-mâché skeleton which I subsequently named Pancho. Since then Pancho has resided on a lovely windsor chair in our dining room. Rogatnick attached a hangman’s noose to Pancho’s neck because he would then display him outside his home on 9^th Avenue on Halloween. There is a connection with Rosemary as Rosemary also placed around Pancho’s neck the little bells she put around her ankles when she went ice skating.

Both Lauren and Rebecca have often posed with Pancho.

The photograph of my León, Guanajuato friend Ivette Hernández is my version of La Santa Muerte , the patron saint of drug traffickers in Northern Mexico.

My Mexican friend poet, novelist and environmentalist, Homero Aridjis, wrote a novel called La Santa Muerte.

Narcotraficantes, políticos, delincuentes, empresarios y policías rinden culto a la Santa Muerte, la imagen de la muerte violenta, para que los proteja de sus enemigos y les otorgue poder, impunidad y dinero.   

Narcos, politicians, delinquents, businessmen, cops all worship the cult of la Santa Muerte, an image of violent death, so they will be protected from their enemies and give them power, impunity and money. My translation.

When I would tell Rosemary that I needed to buy a particular kind of photographic equipment she would say, “If you need it buy it.” I knew that because she was always in control of our purse strings (I could never understand what compound interest was) she would have to adjust her budget to allow for the purchase of my usually expensive equipment.

When we never attempted to save money was when we bought plants for our garden. We bought the best. She was a very good travel agent so when we did travel, particularly with our two granddaughters she knew how to get the best deals.

On my side of all this is that with the exception of the trips she made to Europe with buyers from the company she worked for Mariposa (she supervised the trips) she would buy her own shoes and lovely Italian leather handbags I sometimes did the helping of dressing her up.

Mexico City 1979

When we travelled together I liked to play the game that I was not allowed to play in what we would now define as a macho period of the 20^th century, particularly Buenos Aires in the late 40s and early 50s. I was jealous of the girls that played with dolls.  It was only when we came to Vancouver, and I became a magazine photographer, that I had to find people not only to do the makeup but to supervise the wardrobes of the women I photographed. Finally vicariously,  I could dress up grown up dolls.

With Rosemary it was even more fun. From the very beginning she would take my advice on buying dresses and shoes. Her wedding dress, one with blue birds, was one I chose for her. Most fun was buying shoes with her. I would point out the shoes I liked, I would ask her to sit and I would ask for the shoes.I remember taking apart one of her bras and panties and then cutting a pattern . We then chose a black vinyl material and we made her a sexy bikini. I did some of the sewing as I know how.

Rosemary shortly after we were married in 1968 in the blue bird dress.

The shoe in this scanned composite photograph is one half of the shoes that we bought at a store on Calle Corrientes in Buenos Aires. The colours and the style scream “my Rosemary”.

In Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, which she began to write two days after her husband’s death she was able to take most of his clothes to a store in NY City where she knew the owners. His shoes remained in the closet and she writes that she feared that if she got rid of them he would not come back, ever.

Some of her shoes our youngest daughter Hilary has appropriated. But these Argentine shoes (all Rosemary that they are) will stay in the closet until I meet my personal oblivion.

The framed photographs, there are many on the walls, too, are a constant reminder of her and I cannot avoid looking at them every day when I walk around our little house. I have a very good memory of how and when I took every portrait of her.

It may have been a about three weeks after I first met her that I remember we were at a gathering at Raul Guerrero Montemayor’s house in Mexico City (we slept in the upstairs loft on the floor) that she was to one side of a fireplace with that little almost smile on her face. I was mesmerized staring at her. That little smile of hers is in that photograph with the paper flower taken by my friend Andrew Taylor at the Botanical Garden of the University of Mexico.

To this day, particularly my Argentine friends ask me how a person like you could have landed a woman like her. I don’t know.

But I was lucky. And even luckier to have her by my constant side for 52 years.

DonTirso de Irureta Goyena - Manila

I always prefer to work in the Studio. It isolates people from their environment. They become in a sense…symbolic of themselves. I often feel that people come to me to be photographed as they would go to the doctor or a fortune teller – to find out how they are. So they’re dependent on me. I have to engage them. Otherwise there’s nothing to photograph. The concentration has to come from me to involve them. Sometimes the force of it grows so strong that sounds in the studio go unheard. Time stops. We share a brief and intense intimacy. But it’s unearned. It has no past…no future. And when the sitting is over- when the picture is done – there is nothing left except the photograph…the photograph and a kind of embarrassment. They leave…and I don’t know them. I’ve hardly heard what they’ve said. If I meet them a week later in a room somewhere, I expect they won’t recognize me. Because I don’t really feel I was really there. At least the part of me that was…is now in the photograph. And the photographs have a reality for me that the people don’t. It’s through the photographs that I know them. Maybe it’s in the nature of being a photographer. I’m never really implicated. I don’t have to have any knowledge. It’s all a question of recognitions.

Richard Avedon

I have been haunted for some time by Richard Avedon’s observation on taking portraits of people in his studio.

During  the last couple of nights I have gone further with the idea that I may not know well not only the people I have photographed, but even (and this is what troubles me), those who are my close relatives like my daughters and granddaughters. I stare at the many framed photographs of them in the house. They look back at me and I feel cold.

The photograph here is of my maternal grandfather Don Tirso de Irureta Goyena – 1888-1918.While he died at the age of 30 he managed to publish a book of poetry, be a commanding lawyer and perhaps the only member of the Real Academia Española residing in the Philippines.

I never did ask my mother where he had been born and now my curiosity can never be satisfied because all who might know the answer are dead.

My mother died in 1972 and my grief has dissipated with time. I now remember her smiles and her kindness to this idiot that I am.

But getting back to the idea of not knowing people around me I have discovered that now I feel an extraordinary kinship with my long lost relatives. I almost think I can remember (impossible as I never met him) Don Tirso’s voice and recognize his almost nonexistent smile.

Of Rosemary I cannot escape my thought of her anytime during the day and worse at night. I know her but in a different way that I know and recognize Don Tirso.

I believe that, Alex here, between long dead relatives and the few living ones is gravitating towards a smiling dead horde who seem to be beckoning and welcoming me to join them.

They are incorporeal. My daughters and granddaughters are corporeal. I am desvaneciendo (dissipating, disolving) into being the incorporeal Alex and I will reside in whatever family album of the future my daughters will have. Will they also go through the process? 

Meanwhile my Rosemary is in some sort of transitory limbo, in my head. 

Mexico City circa 1978-79

Until the late 1870s there was no practical way to reproduce a photograph in a newspaper or a magazine. This meant that all those American Civil War photographs would have been seen as etchings or up on a wall at a gallery. There was a method used to reproduce photographs in books (usually appeared as a frontspiece) that was called the photogravure. Because of its intaglio type of printing they could not be placed in normal publications.

With the advent of the halftone process in 1873, a series of black, gray dots and white spaces, finally photographs appeared in newspapers.

The halftone

This innovation marked the beginning of a long relationship between photographers and magazines and newspapers. Until the collapse of journalism in this 21^st century , publications vied to have original photographs and photographers were sent all over the world to take photographs that were original.

In this 2023 photographers post photographs in social media with little explanation. They think that the photograph can stand on its own. They forget that photography from that first photograph of the Steinway Building appearing in a long gone NY newspaper has always been a symbiosis between copy and photograph.

Perhaps these lonely photographs are the product of laziness or not wanting to write on a phone keyboard.

I will not rant about the above and I will continue to mate my photographs with my writing in my now my 5759 blogs.

Many will skip this blog and they may like the image which is a scanner sandwich of two colour negatives.

I believe that the story behind it is interesting.

When Rosemary, our two daughter and I left Mexico City for Vancouver in 1975 my neighbours kept telling me to stay as I was making a good living taking photographs of wealthy Mexican families with my 35mm Pentacon-F and Pentax S-3. The film was Kodak Tri-X and I would process the film in my little bathroom darkroom in our Arboledas, Estado de México little brick home.

I did not have lights but I had a very good light metre. I took my photographs in low contrast situations.

Judging by the  fact that the photograph of this woman (filed under Mexican Girl) is a 6x7cm format it tells me (I have a hazy memory) that sometime in the late 70s I went back to Mexico on assignment for the then Mexicana de Aviación. At the time I only had a 65mm wide angle for my Mamiya RB-67. This meant I could not take tight portraits. I have no idea if I took more pictures. The file only has 6 frames.

The above photograph reveals a few interesting facts. One is that I had yet to learn that you never cut off hands in portraits. On the positive note the painting by Luís Strempler (1928 -2002) is dedicated to Francisco Alonso y Alonso.  He would have been the girl's father.

Somehow I must have contacted the family of the girl and they hired me to photograph her.

At the time, as in most Latin American countries, there is an endemic racism. The family of the girl would have been proud that she was “blanquita” and had blonde hair.

When I shot these photographs I was not yet established as a magazine photographer in Vancouver. I took many photographs of our daughters. This led to my specializing in portraiture. I have not looked back since.

At age 81 I am shooting portraits. And I am proud to write here that I provide content to my photographs.

Juan Manuel Sánchez in his Vancouver studio, 2006

La Sudestada

In 2006 I met an Argentine artist, Juan Manuel Sánchez. We collaborated for about 8 years in Vancouver in tandem with his wife, also an artist, Nora Patrich. I visited him in Buenos Aires, a few months before he died October 5 2016.

This man was a commanding influence in my life. Before I met him, even though I had shows in galleries with my photographs, I considered myself a competent magazine photographer. Sánchez convinced me that I was indeed an artist.

Mentor Missed

While he was older that I was, we shared that now forgotten interest in depicting a woman with little clothing.

Sánchez was a man with an obsession. He painted every day and his subject was the woman of his imagination. He would start with a blank canvas. He told me that when he stared at the canvas he had a problem that had to be resolved. His problem was the task of reducing the woman to a Platonic essence. How much could he remove from his painting and still have the woman? The Spanish word "resolución" is much more mathematical in its meaning than resolution.

One day I said, “Juan if one day you stare at your canvas and then mark the centre with a point, will that be the essence you are looking for?” With a smile on his face he answered, “Perhaps.”

The Essence of a Woman

Over coffee in Buenos Aires, in 2016 I told him that the next time I visited him…he did not allow me to finish, saying, “I will not be here when you come.”

Sánchez told me that my own obsession of taking photographs of women, many without clothes was a perfectly natural thing to do. When the man telling you this looked like a portly Picasso you tended to believe his word. I did.

Now in this century, the many photographs I have taken and keep taking can never be shown anywhere in this city.

I am not bitter about this as I take a cue from American photographer  Garry Winogrand who when he died hundreds of undeveloped rolls were found in his house. Winogrand liked to take photographs. That was enough for him.

I share my photographs with my subjects and when I fix them before I send them by email I enjoy the process. That is enough for me.

Of late I am approaching the Sánchez problem of a resolution. My photography is going into a direction of minimalism.

While I do not believe in ghosts, I can almost sense behind me, Juan Manuel Sánchez and his smile, telling me, “Sos un artista.”

C - Alex Waterhouse-Hayward