In Buenos Aires in 1952, when I was 10 years old, I fell in love for the first time. It was in my 5th grade class and our teacher was Mrs. Zimmerman. We read excerpts of Great Expectations. I soon came to understand that I felt something I had never felt before. I was in love with the remote Estella. I, indeed, to this day, can state that she was my first love.
While I rejected Miss Havisham for being unresponsive to her
ward’s coldness to Pipp I was attracted to her cold non-involvement. This might
have been because I was a nerd before the term existed, and I was afraid to converse
with the women in my class. I was their Pip.
It was in 1967 that I met Rosemary, who was not in the least like Estella. She was warm but at the same time she reflected a cool withdrawn remoteness that reminded me of Miss Havisham.
In my 52 years of marriage I saw in her a combination of Estella and Miss Havisham. Unlike Estella at the end of Great Expectations, it took Rosemary not more than a couple of days to fall under the spell of this Argentine nerd.
This portrait of Yugoslavian friend Nena Kazulin, I shot with the idea of the photograph representing Miss Havisham. It has always been, in its frame, on our living room wall.
Rosemary never did mind as she understood what Miss Havisham, Estella and she represented in my life.