Mexico City circa 1969

 

Prolific would be an understatement to describe my photography. Just of my ,I have thousands and thousands of negatives and slides. Most are filed under year-date. Some of the earlier ones that I took of my Rosemary with our first daughter Alexandra, are in a separate ring binder that contains most of the photographs that I started taking in Austin, Texas in 1958. It was then that I bought a Pentacon-F single lens reflex made in what was then called Russian occupied Germany.

These days of idle living with my two cats, Niño and Niña I am attempting to put order into my photo files. I am not in the least concerned about a legacy, once I meet with my oblivion. It is really no different that vacuuming my house or feeding the cats.

But no matter how plain this task is I do run into photographs (in this case b+w negatives attached to a contact sheet) that have startled me as they are beautiful.

I do know that these pictures of Rosemary and Alexandra were taken at the time when the Mexican Olympics had happened. Rosemary called Alexandra “our Olympic Baby”.

Once I had started my career in Vancouver around 1977, as a magazine photographer, I learned the trick of seeing a contact sheet and immediately being able to identify the keepers.

The four pictures here have pen x-marks on the negative sleeve. This means I may have noticed them years ago. I have no memory of having done that nor if I ever printed them.

Looking at these today, 28 February, 2026 means that I am seeing them for the first time. As I obsessively read Jorge Luís Borges, I keep stating here that he wrote that every first time is followed by the exact first time.

Rosemary is now gone. She died on December 9, 2020 and Alexandra is now 58. This sentence is a first time and it will be followed by the same sentence, over and over.

When I took these photographs we lived in an extremely small and narrow house in the yet to be discovered Zona Rosa of Mexico City. My guess is that I shot these photographs at a nearby park. I do not know if I used that Pentacon-F or a “newer” Asahi Pentax S-3 that I bought used at Foto Rudiger in 1962.

I do know that I can pick up both cameras, they work beautifully today, and if I look through the viewfinder, my variation of the Julian Barnes’s AIM (autobiographical involuntary memory)  a voluntary one will immediately transport me to that first time that Rosemary and Ale faced my camera.