My Mexico City Cameras - scanned 6 October 2023

Going to Mexico DF (CDM) on 12 October will be a journey that will expose me to the ghosts of my mother, grandmother and my Rosemary. Rosemary and I lived there from Dec 1967 until we left for Vancouver  with our two Mexican-born daughters in 1975.

Because I am not too swift it was in the late 90s of the last century when I understood that to have nostalgia for a place you had to be not there. Since then I have taken many photographs to link my nostalgia for Argentina, Mexico and Texas with what I remember of those places.

There is no doubt in my mind that my career in photography both in Mexico City and here in Vancouver came with the backing of Rosemary who pulled strings with our finances so that I could have the equipment I needed.

It was on Thursday, August 15 2013 when my life as a photographer changed for the better because of my Rosemary telling me I needed to buy a digital camera as I could not keep bribing Brazilian, Mexican and Argentine folks at the airport not to X-ray my film.

Because of the intelligent and practical help from Jeff Gin I purchased a Fuji X-E1.

Jeff Gin

Yes I shoot film all the time but my X-E1 and newer X-E3 have given me an opening to a world that would have been hit and miss with a film camera.

In the last 10 years I have pushed my style by using slow shutters and getting what I called swirls. I started with photographs of dancers at the Arts Umbrella Dance Company and from that point on I have not looked back. I am especially happy with my photographs of Art Bergmann’s concert last Friday at the Rickshaw Theatre.

Arts Umbrella Dance Swirls 

Art Bergmann Swirls

Those ghosts in Mexico City I will somehow record with the four cameras I am taking.

The Asahi Pentax S3 (it was used and 2 years old) I purchased at Foto Rudiger on Avenida Venustiano Carranza in Mexico City in 1962. It was my principal camera in Argentina and Mexico until we came to Vancouver.

A month and a bit more ago the shutter button of the Pentax fell out. This involved a complex fixing by Horst Wenzel. To my dismay after he fixed it he died shortly after.

I see the taking of the Pentax as King Arthur returning with Sword Excalibur.

Sword Excalibur Camera

The Widelux will enable me to take interesting swivel-lens panoramics. The X-E3 will be my principal camera for taking portraits of Mexican writers.

And what of my X-E1? I am a firm believer of Patterson’s Law of Photography that states that Murphy was an optimist. It is my backup.

Rosemary & Rosa 'Ebb Tide' 4 October 2023

With today's visits by my friends Art Bergmann and  Dave Chesney I was nicely distracted until they left. Alone with Niña and Niño melancholy set in.

This happens every day, no matter how busy I may try to be. I find myself on the bed with my two cats and suddenly grief befalls me.

I  know that I may have just a little relief by going to my oficina and writing about Rosemary in a blog. She is almost with me as I write.

It works. It is satisfying. But by the time I turn off the lights in bed the sadness sets in.

I have often written here that when we are curious enough to ask those important questions, those who can answer them, are invariably dead.

From my diploma on my oficina wall, I know that I crossed the equator in the Río Aguapey on 11 December 1966. It was a slow boat so by the time I arrived at Veracruz it may have been early February of 1967. By then I had shoulder-length hair. I began to tell people (in Veracruz few understood) that I was a hippie.

I decided I was going to visit my friend Robert Hijar, who at the time was living in the Haight/Ashbury neighbourhood in San Francisco.

There I read Ramparts Magazine, bought a ceramic peace symbol, and played being a hippie but rejecting all requests I toke up.

Nevado de Toluca - 1968

Ceramic Peace Symbol in this blog

I returned to Veracruz and went to the Mocambo beach. My mother was worried so she suggested I go to Mexico City and look for a job.

Once there my friend Raúl  Guerrero Montemayor told me he was going to teach me the Berlitz Language system so that I could work out of the school he was employed by. The school sent teachers to instruct Mexican executives in American companies in English. We were also sent to American hotels to teach their employees to deal with American tourists.

And so it was that sometime in mid-December 1967, as I was leaving the school, I saw a young woman walking away from the school. I saw her from the back and she had straight and long blond hair, she was wearing a dark blue miniskirt, and her legs were divine. From that point my memory is blank and I have no idea how I approached her.  Within a week I took her to visit my mother in Veracruz for Christmas and by February 8 1968 we were married.

How did I approach her? What did I tell her or ask her? What did she tell me?

I have a memory (the only one) that in the front seat of my VW Beetle, a few days later, she had her legs up and she began to tell me something about relationships. And that is it.

Now with her gone, I will never know how it was that I connected with the woman I lived with for 52 years.

A chacmool (also spelled chac-mool or Chac Mool,) is a form of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican sculpture depicting a reclining figure with its head facing 90 degrees from the front, supporting itself on its elbows and supporting a bowl or a disk upon its stomach. These figures possibly symbolised slain warriors carrying offerings to the gods; the bowl upon the chest was used to hold sacrificial offerings, including pulque, tamales, tortillas, tobacco, turkeys, feathers, and incense. In Aztec examples, the receptacle is a cuauhxicalli (a stone bowl to receive sacrificed human hearts). Chacmools were often associated with sacrificial stones or thrones. The chacmool form of sculpture first appeared around the 9th century AD in the Valley of Mexico and the northern Yucatán Peninsula.

Aztec chacmools bore water imagery and were associated with Tlaloc, the rain god. Their symbolism placed them on the frontier between the physical and supernatural realms, as intermediaries with the gods. Wikipedia

Sitting at my dining room table, opposite the wall that is full of Mexican objects and framed photographs of Rosemary and me, I noticed this today. If anything is shows how my Bunny Watson connections enable me to think of links that may not be obvious.

The photograph in the scanograph here, which I have placed often in these blogs, was taken by my Yorkshire compadre Andrew Taylor in 1968 at the Botanical Garden of the University of Mexico. Of why we posed with a Mexican paper flower, I have no memory. But I do remember that Andrew used my Asahi Pentax S-3 with the 50mm f-2 lens loaded with Kodak colour negative film.

My Sword Excalibur Cameras in Mexico

While I was staring at this photograph, my thought process immediately took me to the sad understanding that both of us were alive for the photograph but now only I exist. This concept is a hard one to digest when I see photographs of Rosemary all over the house. I think, “She is not here.” This happens all day. I cannot escape it.

As I looked at the photograph I was struck by how my pose resembled a Mayan chac-mool.

The human mind is such an extraordinary and complex mechanism. If only I could now reconcile and accept Rosemary’s nonexistence and go on with what is left of my life.

1969 with Alexandra by the American Embassy

In these blogs I have written frequently on my feelings of nostalgia for countries I have lived in. I have also mentioned how I discovered late in my life that to have nostalgia for a place one cannot be in that place.

Canada brings me memories of Neal Young singing Ohio or Art Bergmann singing Hawaii.

Texas has to be Willie Nelson singing Blue Skies and Argentina (particularly Buenos Aires) has to be any Astor Piazzolla.

What of Mexico a place I lived from 1943 to 1964 and from 1967 to 1975?

In the early 30s Aaron Copland was taken to a nightclub of ill-repute, El Salón México, by Mexican composer Carlos Chávez. There at a table Copland saw taxi dancers in an atmosphere that he liked so much he returned often and finally completed his El Salón México in 1936.

In the years 1967 to 1975 in Mexico City I shared my life with my Rosemary and two daughters. Particularly from 1967 for a couple of years we lived near a movie house called Cine Chapultepec on the lovely boulevard  Avenida Reforma. We had two choices when attending a film. One was to show up just before it began. When this happened the movie house was full and we could not sit together. The other option was to go 40 or more minutes before. In our comfortable seats together we were subjected to PRI (Partido Revolucioario Intstitucional)  propaganda that featured the presiden cutting ribbons at hospitals, etc. More often than not the music in the backround was Copland’s El Salón México.

There are authentic Mexican composers like Carlos Chávez and Silvestre Revueltas but to me (and obviously for the makers of the PRI propaganda, Copland was the most Mexican sounding one. I agree.

In Youtube if you know the existence of a favourite piece of music you can usually find it. That is how I found a terrific video in b+w, with a luxury of multiple film camera work probably shot at Carnegie Hall that features Leonard Bernstein introducing Aaron Copland on his birthday who proceeds to conduct El Salón México.

I cannot view this video without thinking of my Rosemary when we were young and living on Calle Herodoto. Just like Herodotus wrote that you could never touch a spot on a river twice, I grieve but still remember fondly those days that now seem to be so much simpler and rosier. 

And to finish with a smile I remember once when Rosemary and I were sitting far appart watching an English film with Peter Sellers that often had bathroom scene jokes. In this one a bidet was mentioned. Mexicans did not seem to know what a bidet was so heard Rosemary laughing on the other side of the movie house.

El Salón México