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| Rosemary and Alexandra at the Museum of Anthropology - Mexico - 1968 |
"Se puede matar todo menos la nostalgia, la llevamos en el color de los ojos, en cada amor, en todo lo que profundamente atormenta y desata y engaña".
Julio Cortázar
“You can kill everything except nostalgia, we have it in the colour of our eyes, in every love, and in everything that profoundly torments us, unleashes, and cheats.”[my translation]
The Brazilians have a lovely word for nostalgia, saudade. I was much too dense to figure out until the end of the 20th century that in order to have nostalgia for a place you have to be in another place.
My nostalgia is complex as I have a nostalgia for the Argentina I left in 1952, the one I returned for almost three years in 1965 and the repeated times that I went back as a journalist and with my Rosemary and our two granddaughters. I have quadruple nostalgia for Mexico, the one I went to in 1953 with my mother and grandmother, the one I returned to after my four year period in St. Edward’s High School in Austin, Texas and then the Mexico City of from 1967 to 1975 with my Rosemary and two daughters. That last one is the many times that Rosemary and I returned to Mexico sometimes with our granddaughters.
This idea of nostalgia became strong when in the late 90s I met Argentine painters Nora Patrich and Juan Manuel Sánchez. We had a large show at a Granville gallery of our photographs, drawings and paintings that expressed our rosy nostalgia for our Argentina.
What makes my nostalgia especially strong is that my father was a good friend of Julo Cortázar. Cortázar would come to our Buenos Aires home in Coghlan and the writer would send me out to get him Argentine cigarettes as he had a disdain for my father’s Player’s Navy Cuts.
And then there is that Canadian nostalgia that somehow was unleashed right here in Vancouver. Cortázar’s protagonist in his novel Rayuela (Hopscotch) is freezing in a Paris winter. He buys a flannel shirt which Cortázar calls “una canadiense”
Many of my photographs, especially my portraits are motivated by nostalgia.
