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| Alexandra Elizabeth Waterhouse-Hayward |
Little did I know when I opened a box in Austin, Texas in 1958 from B&H New York that the Pentacon-F (Dresden made) would take me to what I became - a photographer. And this photographer, in the end, excelled (my opinion) in portraiture.
I am now 83 and when I remember the hundreds of thousands of negatives and slides I have taken (I don’t remember all of them but random association does help), I get this feeling that all of it was, but will never again be. Some of my peers retire and stop taking photographs. I persist but I still have this thought that it’s really over for me.
After meeting up with 91 year old photographer Pedro Meyer, who is actively shooting, I had to stop on my melancholic thoughts.
But what will not return are the portraits like this one that are on the many walls of my Kitsilano Duplex. Alexandra Elizabeth Waterhouse-Hayward (the last of the Waterhouse-Haywards) was a young woman that posed for me in a BC Ferry. There is to me an amazing look and stare of this photograph.
Is it really over for me? Or is it over when it’s over?
Borges would have told me that when I look at Ale’s portrait as I walk down the stairs, I am again taking it for the first time. Borges insists that first times are first times again and again.
I think of my new friend, the almost blind Pedro Meyer. Would my memory be as good as his for photographs that he has taken in his past. Does blindness reinforce memory?
