Quite often in these blogs I quote my grandmother who would often tell me that when the devil was bored he swatted flies with his tail.
It is next to impossible for me to explain that taking care of two cats, performing the household menialities and having no obligations produces enajenamiento. This Spanish word sounds a lot better to me than the English equivalent existential angst.
I have no financial worries, I am more or less healthy and every day when I am not thinking of my dear departed Rosemary It seems I am just waiting for something to happen. What that is is most obvious.
And so I sit at my chair by my computer and swat photographic flies with my computer and film files.
Two days ago I wrote here about my Ektachromes with Lisa who now lives in Seattle. The pictures I looked at today I shot in 1986. I am again most interested in these photographs as I did not light them. In fact a cliché of clichés is that I photographed her with reflections on her body from her curtain blinds. I often think that clichés are indeed that simply because the work.
Today my fly swatting involved putting one negative on top of the other on my scanner. I call these scanner negative sandwiches.
I remember some years ago that I had a chat with a beautiful woman in a café and I asked her if she would pose for me. She said, “I don’t do boudoir.” I was insulted as I believe that my photographs, and particularly these are not that.
Now at my age of 83 I would no longer pursue taking photographs like these. The photographs I took in 1986 of Lisa showed lots of nipples. I would never place them here.
Now when I think of my Rosemary, while bed rotting with my two cats, I do not think of sex or anything erotic. I think of getting close to her and smelling her behind her ear and enjoying the warmth of her body.
Bed rotting this morning with Niña on top of me I looked at Rosemary’s framed photograph on the wall and thought, “The three of us are together.”
