The first Christmas - 1950 - George Waterhouse Hayward

I Remember Five Christmases

Tomorrow Christmas Eve I am invited for dinner at my younger daughter Hilary’s Burnaby home. Her older sister Alexandra (who lives in Lillooet) will be there as will Hilary’s daughters Lauren (21) and Rebecca (26) with their respective boyfriends. Of course my son-in-law Bruce and his mother Marjory will be in attendance.

With my loss of  Rosemary before 2020 Christmas, I hardly know how to celebrate without her. We shared everything. I was not looking forward to driving to Burnaby even though Bruce is a good cook and Hilary will have lots of baking to offer us.

I did not sleep much last night as I began to cook up an idea that now is making me look forward to Nochebuena (Christmas Eve in Spanish) tomorrow. This blog is thus a practice run on my “Show & Tell – I Remember Five Christmases”

Christmas for me begins at the first Christmas I remember. It was in Buenos Aires in 1950. Because Christmas falls in the middle of an Argentine summer, I recall that is was very hot on the Christmas Eve evening when we went to Misa de Gallo (Midnight Mass). My mother who had connections with the American Embassy had produced a can of fake Noma snow and told me to spray our tree.

The little church was around the corner from our house. I cannot forget that when they passed the collection tray, my father who was an alcoholic and probably quite drunk, placed some mints (I even remember the brand name, Volpi) in the tray and I was terribly embarrassed.

We went home and under the tree my gift was a beautiful red Schuco Maserati racer like the one Juan Manuel Fangio drove. It had suspension and steering. It had a windup motor. Within minutes I was crying as I had lost the windup key. My father, by now sober, told me, “Alexander, Santa Claus had a suspicion you would lose the key so he gave me an extra one. Here it is.”

By the next year my father voluntarily left our home to live in a pension. This he did. My mother, grandmother and I left for Mexico City in 1953 without telling him we were gone. This would bother me for many years.

The next Christmas, this one a memorable one, happened a few weeks before Christmas 1965. I was doing my obligatory military service in the Argentine Navy and I was given a week of leave before Christmas. I was madly in love with a Jewish girl called Susy Bornstein. I could not understand how any beautiful woman could possibly fall for a nerd like me, and especially with my navy crewcut. She took me to the Ezeiza airport. We were both shocked to see my Braniff Boeing 707 which was painted in bright colours. I did not know then that the design was by Alexander Calder. 

Susy Bornstein - Buenos Aires - 1965

Filomena Cristeta de Irureta Goyena Hayward

 I distinctly felt uncomfortable as I had a few cold sores on my lips. This did not prevent Susy from giving me on of the longest and finest kisses in my memory.

My mother had managed to find money to pay for my round-trip ticket to Mexico City and from there by bus to Veracruz.

This specific Christmas is one that left me in shock for many years. My mother told me, “Alex because I am a mother I have to love my son and I love you. But I have never liked you. Something in Argentina has made you change and I beginning to like you."

I do believe I may have told my mother that when I had first arrived to Buenos Aires I had been able to locate my father. We had pleasant weekends chatting until he died of a heart attack sometime in October.

 The third Christmas was a melancholy one. After my military service, an admiral  (Almirante Garzoni) had felt sorry for me and he had found me passage as the only passenger on a an Argentine Merchant Marine (ELMA) Victory Ship called Río Aguapey.

Río Aguapey

I boarded it November 1966 and I found myself on a slow boat, that stopped in every Brazilian port. For fun I decided to photograph every sunset (that cured me for life as I  have never been tempted since.) and I discovered Oswald Spengler as my reading material.

We arrived in New Orleans on Christmas Eve. I went into town, and in my complete ignorance on the subject, I decided to see burlesque in a bar on Bourbon Street. This was a complete letdown. I ordered a bourbon (I gagged drinking it) and watched a bored woman turn on some tunes on a jukebox and she danced with no visible emotion. She did not impress me and I left.

I went to the ship, where we had a complete Christmas dinner, that included all kinds of Argentine beef. We drank pre-dinner drinks, had wine during the meal and we finished with desserts and more drinks.

My mother called to the ship’s phone. Nobody answered. We were all drunk. On a much lighter note I must point out that many years later I found out that my Río Aguapey had been built at the Burrard Shipyards in North Vancouver.

The fourth Christmas is the best I ever had. Sometime in the end of November 1967, I was teaching English in American companies in Mexico City. One afternoon, as I was leaving the school to go to teach at Colgate Palmolive, I spotted a woman in front of me who was also leaving. I saw her (from the back). She had long, straight blond hair; she was wearing a very short, dark blue mini skirt and had legs that rivalled my mother’s. To this day I cannot remember how I approached Rosemary Elizabeth Healey (from New Dublin, Ontario).

On February 8 of the next year, 1968 we were married in the fashionable Coyocán neighbourhood by a judge.

When Christmas approached I told Rosemary I wanted to show her off to my mother in Veracruz. 

Mocambo - Veracruz - Christmas 1967

I have no recollection if I placed my Pentacon-F on a tripod and used its self-timer or if my mother snapped the photograph of us at the Mocambo Beach.

The Fifth Christmas will be tomorrow. Part of my show and tell will be that I will bring my pot of Camellia sasanqua ‘Yuletide’ to show my family how in her own special way Rosemary will be present. 

I will also point out that since my fingers have grown smaller I am again wearing my wedding ring made with a band of fired blue enamel.

Christmas for me, as it must be for most people, is a combination of past memories and a routine. In a changing world, particularly this nasty one, routine can be comforting.

For me it is no longer the case as I lived 52 Christmases with Rosemary and have spent the last 3 (and the one to come) without her. Since I can remember, the special day has always been Christmas Eve which is Nochebuena in Spanish.  For Mexican beer aficionados there is indeed a very good ale called Nochebuena that is sold during the Christmas season.

In my Buenos Aires youth Christmas Eve was at 40 degree Celsius. Christmas in Argentina is in their summer. My mother who had access to stuff from the American Embassy would bring fake Noma spray snow and I was given the job of spraying the tree.

In Mexico our trees were always imported from Canada even though a few of us know that Mexico has the greatest variety of pine trees in the world. 

In Vancouver since 1975 Rosemary and I shared the pleasure of decorating our tree.

I will be going to my Burnaby daughter’s house for Christmas Eve. She, her husband Bruce, her two daughter and respective boyfriends will be there plus Bruce’s mother.

For me this is a sad occasion that I would have liked to avoid but I know I have an obligation. One of them was to always take that family Christmas group photo.

This year I am not taking my camera with me. After having done my research with Jeff Gin (Kerrisdale Cameras manager on Lonsdale) I have purchased a Canon Selphy. This is a small printer (it uses paper and ink) that produces 3x4 inch photographs and it communicates with a phone by WiFi. I have given it as a Christmas present, ahead of time, to my youngest granddaughter so she can figure out how to use it. Lauren, 21, is smart with this sort of stuff. She has told me that her phone has a 10-second timer so she can include herself in the shot. I am taking a small tripod with a very nice phone clamp so Lauren can position it at the right distance.

In this day and age, few now have sound systems and they mostly rely on YouTube on their TV.

In my mother’s Christmas tradition we always played the Hungarian pianist George Feyer’s record Echoes of Spain. Hilary will have to play it on YouTube. In our other tradition we had with Rosemary we loved to play the John Denver with the Muppets cassette and then the CD when it became available. Again Hilary will have to play this on her TV.

The playing will instantly join us in a pleasant but melancholy memory of Christmases past.

George Feyer's Echoes of Christmas on YouTube 

John Denver - The Muppets - A Christmas Together - YouTube

Top - Nissan 300ZX - Porsche Carrera - 4 June 1990

Today I was thinking what I could possibly write that would be something positive and pleasant as I suffer my Christmas melancholy associated with my loss of Rosemary.

Thinking about it last night I knew exactly what that would be although I will just be adding (in the beginning!) a preamble.

The photograph illustrating the previous blog (in link above) and this one is the most difficult photograph I ever took in my long career. Its reason for existence is that Vancouver Magazine Editor, Malcolm Parry was a decent photographer in his own right and his command for the photograph we collaborated in involved his magical preconception. Of preconception have written about here. Minor White - Previsualizing the Unpredictable

While I explain in the blog (The Penguin in the Arctic) the mechanics of the shot (and shots that led to the one used) the most nonsensical demand of his (but he was proven right) that I mount a portable flash (a Norman 200B, heavy one at that) for the photograph. In the photograph you will see that little flash in front of the Porsche I was riding in. Did Mac (as we affectionately called him) preconceive that little flash on the pavement?

In this 21^st century with the rapid disappearance of good magazines and pushy (but smart) art directors like the two I worked with, Rick Staehling and Chris Dahl, photographers are now ships without rudders.

I am glad I was around when those excellent persons pushed me.

María de Lurdes Béjar - June 1991

One day, quite some time ago, I happened on a photograph of Napoleon's younger brother, Jerome, taken in 1852. And I realized then, with an amazement I have not been able to lessen since: "I am looking at eyes that looked at the Emperor." Sometimes I would mention this amazement, but since no one seemed to share it, nor even understand it (life consists of these little touches of solitude), I forgot about it.

 Chapter 1 - Camera Lucida - Reflections on Photography

Roland Barthes

Tomorrow is the shortest day of the year. Some folks have sent me Christmas cards in envelopes with stamps on them. It seems to me that remnants of my 20^th century are still surviving on the skin of their teeth.

I am using the term “skin of their teeth” because in 1960 at St. Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas, Brother Dunstan Bowles, C.S.C. introduced us to Thornton Wilder’s The Skin of Our Teeth.

I could not sleep but must have finally fallen into that other world of dreams around 2. I woke up at 10 and my considerate cats let me sleep. As I went down to feed them and make my breakfast it became obvious, as it is to me every day now, that I did not have to do anything today.

Finally I went into my cozy oficina and looked at some of my files. I decided that I would write a blog today that is not connected at all with the coming Christmas.

I took the photographs of the Mexican-born María de Lurdes Béjar in June 1991. A few years later she died. I had not yet connected the idea that nostalgia is something you have when you are not in the country you have nostalgia for. Much later I photographed my León, Guanajuato friend in many situations that evoked our mutual feelings for nostalgia for Mexico.

La cara de mi nostalgia por México

Because I am a photographer I have this constant thought when I look at pictures of people that I photographed in my past that are now dead and I wonder (as in feel wonder) that the person posing was alive and thriving. But, is now no more. This is a thought that immediately comes to me when I bring my breakfast tray (as I did today and every day) and place it on the side of the bed that Rosemary once occupied.

I believe that my constant thought of her non-existence, my thoughts of my own statistically soon-to-happen non-existence are exacerbated (wrong word I believe) are enhanced by the simple fact that the people of my life, most of them, faced my camera with me behind it.

This is why I always marvel at that quote by Roland Barthes. And I am horrified that I did not notice Béjar's neck folds. I always find a way of not showing them!

Jo-Ann Sept 2009 - Robson & Granville

There is one aspect of Christmas that in spite of the now 3 years since my Rosemary died that I somehow still do. I like to go to my hugely extensive files and look for stuff that I have probably forgotten or overlooked.

Before the internet I would print photographs in my darkroom that met my eye. Now with the infinite size of space of the internet I look at pictures that I may have overlooked.

That is the case of Jo-Ann on the roof. Jo-Ann posed for me between 2007 and 2009. I called her the Thursday girl as that was the day she often came into my Granville and Robson studio. She had a lovely body and my photographs were records of that body. In few of them did I even attempt to inject any kind of eroticism.

This photograph of her on the roof of my studio was inspired from my knowledge that Edward Weston photographed Tina Modotti nude on the roof of their Mexico City home in the 30s. Why could I  not do this on the roof of my studio?

This photograph, which I have cropped for “community standards” somehow hits me hard. Why?

I wrote about that in this blog (not a bad one at all an worth a couple of emojis) which is titled The Tension is There.

I Wrote 

People interact in real life. It can be wife to husband or friend to friend. I believe that there is an additional interaction when one of the persons is a portrait photographer.

I have written before how a camera can be placed in front of a person and not moved. Then the person’s relatives, partner or would-be partner, the mailman, the teacher snap photographs. Could one figure out who took which photograph?

The Spanish word for taking a portrait is “retratar”. It comes from Latin and it means to draw out, which is close to the modern term now used for taking a photograph which is to capture.

When I take a portrait I like to show what I think the person is like. At the same time the person is thinking of what aspect of their life they want to expose to the photographer. A good photographer can somehow lower the guard of the subject. Sometimes the photographer can be completely surprised by subject as I was when I faced Liv Ullmann and she said to me,"Don't ask me to smile."

 There was aother situation in which I was overwhelmed. In our Thursday lunches at the Railway Club in the past century there was a beautiful blonde woman who always sat alone. We wondered who she was. I took my chances (that could not be done in this century) and went up to her and said,"My name is Alex Waterhouse-Hayward and I would like to photograph you undraped." She looked at me and answered, "When do you want to do this"

She was prompt to appear at my studio. She took all her clothes off. To my horror she had had a mastectomy and had a huge cesarean scar. In this century I would have included all that. In that last century I worked my way around that. I took this one photograph (many other very nice ones) that is one of my favourite images ever.

In my photography classes at the now gone Focal Point on 10^th Avenue I taught a popular course called “The Contemporary Portrait Nude”. There was an exercise I enjoyed doing and exposed my students to. I told them that our model (it could be a man or a woman) was going to stay in one spot and would start with clothes on and finish with none in only five poses. Sometimes I would do that in reverse order. For some of my students who had never done this sort of thing it was a tad challenging.

The model may have posed many times before but the prospect of not taking their clothes immediately sometimes confused them.

That brings me to the photograph of Jo-Ann on the roof.

Would the photograph be seen differently if we knew she was wearing clothes below my crop?

When I look at this photograph I feel the tension within me of the moment of facing her on the roof with nothing on and perhaps also some feelings of vulnerability from her even if she did pose for me unclothed many times.

The photograph is stark and sharp and that adds to the idea of tension. It is not a romantic shot. It records a woman not wearing anything on the roof of a city.

Can one photograph communicate so much?

I can remember one time when I failed miserably. Here it is:  Candice Bergen - My Failure