Ivette Hernández

 

It has been said that we do not remember days but we remember moments.

These days of continued melancholy about my loss of Rosemary four years ago, I find myself diverting my memory moments to others in my life that are no longer around.

It was 24 years ago when this idiot came to understand that nostalgia is something you feel for a place when one (very important) is not in that place.

Many of those moments are about my many years in Mexico. Today I wanted to write a blog that would involve a beautiful woman. It was around 1963 that my mother took me to see El Abanico de Lady Windermere by Oscar Wilde (pronounced Wheeldhe) with Dolores del Río. Of those moments I will never forget her voice.

When Ivette Hernández (born in León, Guanajuato) and I explored our mutual nostalgia for Mexico I told her about Lady Windermere. She was keen to pose for the idea. I badly underexposed the Ektachrome and I did not use a kicker (a small light at eye level) that would have produced catch lights in her eyes.

Now I can see that my mistake has paid off in my new interpretation of Lady Windermere which then was about femininity. Now I can see in Hernandez’s face that inscrutable (what is she thinking?) face of many Mexican women.

That inscrutable face so lacking in all those current red carpet photographs of famous women.