The laundress' boy was called Chino, of so I thought.

I learned later that Chino is a name for a specific racial mixture (not including Chinese) in Mexico's very fine-grained system of categorizing racial mixtures, a system centuries old, elaborated in many series of paintings one sees reproduced still all through the country. (One set of originals is in the museum in Chapultapec Castle in D.F.) Mexico was a very inter-racial nation long before The United States or European nations were. Not that this made class distinctions any softer or less limiting.

"Casta divisions were the most important component in the Colonial language of power, and the Inquisition reflected the need to distinguish in order to punish accordingly. The notorious casta paintings of 18th century Mexico speak volumes about an obsession with racial mixture and the fear of the ensuing social upheaval," wrote Baltasar Fra Molinero of Bates College.

As I recall, a Chino includes African heritage. Chino may have been so nicknamed because of his curly hair and dark skin.

Fred Chez, with Marco Antonio and Isidorio, one of the hitchhikers, waiting for Omar to shoot the ball. Mrs. Peña allowed the boys in but disapproved of them. Isidorio was dark-skinned, Omar lighter. The little boy was the son of the laundry woman who worked for the Peñas.

Marco Antonia Peña

Friends in Guadalajara seeking the family learned from people living on that street that Mrs. Peña and Maria had both passed away. The effort to find Marco Antonio were stymied by my failure to note his full name. Mexicans like Spaniards have both a maternal and a paternal last name, and I had not made note of the other name.

My room was through this doorway to a separate structure off to the left. My friends could come and visit me and play basketball in the courtyard with Marco Antionio Peña, the Señora's son, a medical student. When I was able to move around, he took me to visit his medical school, part of the University of Guadalajara.

The Señora and Maria seated in their "sala abierta."

I have no recollection of their interior rooms. I do not believe I ever sat with them inside, or had a meal at their table. My food was brought to me in a little room in the back of the house.

Señora Peña and her daughter Maria.

The house of the Peña family, where I was taken that evening. I recall the address as 34 Guadalupe Victoria. I lived here for a week. The generosity shown me by this family was remarkable, and is still characteristic of Mexican people, as Earl Shorris points out in his book of 2004, The Life and Times of Mexico.

This address is about ten blocks from Instituto Cabañas. where I exhibited the 1953 photographs and told this story to the press in 2008. All attempts on my behalf to find surviving members of the family failed. The house is no longer there.

Back to Guadalajara in 1953: Fireworks in front of the cathedral for the Fiesta of the Virgin of Zapopan. Just a few blocks from here, my exhibit of this and other of the photographs was to take place in 2008, in the month of May.

Right after I took this picture, I fell ill. Dysentary, probably from eating the oysters back outside of Mazatlan. Since we were camping on the roadside outside of the city in what was then open country to the North, my companions, Fred and the Mexican hitchhikers, left me there the next day at my insistence. I said "Go back into Guadalajara and enjoy the paseo on Sunday," since in those days young couples strolled around the square in front of and beside the cathedral to see one another and perhaps meet, in the style of 19th century Spain. I said "Come back tonight and I'll probably feel better."

So they left me on a cot, well off the highway at the edge of a cleared area left by road crews. I did not think I would be noticed by cars whizzing past. Next to the cot were a canteen of water and two rolls of toilet paper for my frequent rushes into the nearby bush.

As I lay there, I noticed one car slow down and a family inside studying me. It must have been an odd sight, but one that told its own story fairly clearly. A few hours later, the same car came back from its excursion and pulled into the clearing. A woman and her grown son and daughter were in the car. The woman got out to speak with me. I had enough high-school Spanish to explain my situation.

She said "You will not be better by tonight. You will not be better for a week. Have your friends bring you to our home in Guadalajara, and we will give you a room to sleep in and proper food to see that you recover and can resume your trip soon." She gave me her address, and drove away.

An Exhibit in Guadalajara in May, 2008 of 72 of the photographs from "Mexico 1953"

Talk at the opening "conferencia," Guadalajara, May 8 2008, at Instituto Cabanas


I suppose the first question I should deal with is whether the photographer of all these
old images is still alive.

That is not as easy to answer as it should be.

In fact he was very young and serious about photography, but in a few years his career
took him away from still photography for many years.

I finally managed to use some of his skills as a filmmaker. I shot many documentaries
and television commercials and slide shows for my own company and others. But in
retirement, with time to review it all, I think the best work was in those early years,
when his enthusiasm and purpose was purely seeing.

I want to read you some words from the great critic and curator of photography at the
New York Museum of Modern Art, John Szarkowsky, from his book of 1977, Looking
at Photographs.

"In childhood, each of us was open to dramas of the senses, revealed in terms that
were trivial and ephemeral: the way leaves move, the lost space between the
window screen and the glass, the reflection of the sun from a hand mirror on the
dressing table, slowly tracing its elliptical course across the ceiling.

"Many of us forget the existence of such experiences when we learn to measure
the priorities of practical life, or we find that they are rare or elusive.

"A few, whom we call artists, maintain an easy intimacy with these wonders of
simple perception. In this century many of these have been photographers, and
the exploration of our fundamental sensory experience has been in large part their
work. It is photography that has continued to teach us of the pleasure and the
adventure of disinterested seeing."

2

It has been observed that the development of any adult skill may depend upon freezing
some moment of childhood. All scientists are forever four years old, wide-eyed and
self-centered. All writers are always eight years old, hyper-aware and resentful. And all
magicians and, I would say, photographers, are eternally twelve years old, having first
felt the power of making a magic box work and gaining control of people’s wayward
attention.

The magic box for us is the camera, that ultimate gadget, which finally might enable us to speak about reality with something like eloquence. And behind it stood the occult
magic of the darkroom to master.

Twelve it was for me, first with a Kodak Brownie camera. At 13 I gathered my
earnings from delivering morning newspapers and purchased a real camera, a small
Speed Graphic. In the 1940s, news photographers used Speed Graphics, only larger.
It was my rite of passage. I shot events and sports for the high school paper, and set
out to explore the city and beyond.

Or rather, he did.

3

In what sense should photography be considered art? We are all surrounded by
photographs all our lives. They do the job of communicating reality, but are they art?

In the 20th century, the idea grew that some photographs should be viewed as art.
The distinction seemed to come down to their intent. Was the photo taken to serve a
purpose, like an ad or a news or sports photo? Or was it to share a personal vision,
a way of seeing, and was that way worth experiencing?

When we view any art, this is a question we ask. Do I want to explore this artist’s mind?

The artists that produced beautiful or striking images with cameras began to shape
the world of art photography in the second quarter of the 20th century. They were my
models — I knew not why. Adams, Weston, Cartier-Bresson, Doisneau, Eugene Smith,
Walker Evans, Alvarez Bravo, Frank, and the great artists whose work Steichen
gathered in The Family of Man. Then in the 1960s and 70s their work began to be
seriously criticized, analyzed, exhibited and published. And collected. And then
photography became art.

Szarkowsky, who succeeded Steichen at the Museum of Modern Art was a key figure
in this development.

His collections and writings gave a rich meaning to the idea of noticing. of seriously
considering a photograph’s content and intent. When I discovered his work in the
1990s, it was exciting. I felt justified in all the time I had spent making images for
many years with no client or known destination. And what he said, what I would like
to say, is get close. Notice the immense amount of information in a photograph.
And notice what narrative is its apparent intent.

Mind you, the intent you find, the story you write, may not have been the
photographer’s. For Szarkowsky that did not matter. Photographers often do not
think through why they make a picture. But if they are worth watching, chances are
that their fast choice arose from a background of aesthetic learning and judgment,
and it reflects an interesting attitude toward humanity or nature: loving, angry or
dour, reverent or humorous, and a respect for design, structure and composition.

4

Your interpretation of a photograph will reflect your own life experience. If it is
interesting or touching, the photograph will have done its work.

(I then shared my own observations about a few of the photographs the
young man made.) I am in almost the same position as you, for I honestly do not
remember taking most of these photographs, although I remember the trips.
Here you are hearing what I experienced in 2004, when I first returned to this
box of 400 old negatives and began paying real attention to them.

(Since this would take the pictures out of sequence, I omit this conclusion here.)

An international style residence in Guadalajara. Fred and I were interested in the spread of modern architecture in Mexico, which was more accepting of Bauhaus International style than the United States. It seemed to harmonize with the pre-Columbian architecture.

The city gate of Guadalajara. Rather empty around it.

The Guadalajara cathedral. Fruit sellers set up in the street in front. I see Omar and Isidorio there bargaining for us.

The maguey fields. The same plant makes pulque and aloe vera.
We were on our way to Guadalajara an hour away.

The bottling room. Obviously it was a small Tequila distillery.

Omar points to the hearts of maguey plants piled up in an oven for cooking.

In Tequila, we found a distillery

I READ RECENTLY in an article by Adam Gopnik (The New Yorker, 3/17/08) that it has been observed that every great adult skill requires sustaining some moment of childhood. All scientists are eternally four years old, wide-eyed and self-centered. Writers, he said, are "forever eight years old, over-aware and indignant." Magicians (the subject of his article), and, I would argue, photographers are eternally twelve years old, having discovered how to do their first sleight of hand trick or make a magic box trick work -- or having used their first camera, that ultimate, magnificent gadget.

Twelve it was for me. Unlike my previous fascinations like building forts in the woods or a chemistry set, the camera was a world of possibility contained in a small gadget. which I could learn to use better and better. And around it hovered the occult magic of the darkroom. At thirteen I entered high school, and used my paper route earnings to buy a small Speed Graphic camera, the Brownie no longer being complicated enough.

We noticed that the boys privately considered the young farmer as not quite bright or respectable, our first glimpse of class distinctions that they would later in the trip be victims of themselves. They may have been runaways, but they were highschool students too. The young farmer was not.

On the way in, however, we got interested in a farmer plowing a new field with oxen and a wooden plow. The boys helped us get permission.

In the distance is the town of Tequila, under Mount Tequila. We wanted to stop in.

Frazer, Fred and the boys at La Valle de la Magdalena.

In thinking about the use of captions I realize that I had forgotten an early influence on my photography, which affected me before I left for Mexico in 1953 -- Wright Morris' book The Inhabitants (1946). Morris was a novelist first, a photographer second, but a good one. On a fellowship he traveled in 1940 the depression-broken Midwest, shooting abandoned homes and farmsteads, and in his book each photograph was accompanied by a full page of imagined conversation or interior monologue by the departed inhabitants.

The photographs were good. But the combination of words and picture was especially evocative. The words made me dwell on the photograph and see it better. It was an approach Morris hoped to carry on, but after a couple of such "photo-texts" (his name for them) his publisher told him there was no market for them, so he just wrote novels, for which he won awards and became famous.

Szarkowski at MOMA championed Morris' photography and gave him an exhibition there, and there was a retrospective of his photography at SF MOMA in 1996, I believe. I received one of his original 8 by 10 prints from the anthropologist Dorothy Lee, who knew him, in the early sixties but never again saw The Inhabitants until my daughter gave me a copy 2004. Clearly this, along with The Family of Man, were major influences on my views of photographic art. Words were always involved.

On the question of captions: I say, if a viewer's appreciation of a photograph, and of the artist's intention, is enhanced by a caption, then it is a legitimate addition to the photograph. As an artist, I love the idea of presenting a photograph with "Untitled" as its caption, I have to be careful about its use. It is in a way a slap in the face. "Oh, you looked down here for an interpretation? Well, you'll just have to do the work yourself!" At times that is a very gentle slap and the viewer reacts well, and does see what the artist wants him to see, or ends up in the state of befuddlement the artist wants him to be in. But finally, the viewer has to decide whether this is a mind he wants to fathom.

Because what is this artistic transaction? The artist went to a lot of trouble for somebody. The viewer is investing his valuable time. (You don't think your time is valuable? Just get old!) Something has to be trans-acted. From one to another. What makes it worthwhile?

The artist of "The Surrender of Breda" knew that his client was the king, and the audience beyond him was the people who would feel inspired by the triumph and the magnanimity of the victor. It was a complex message to be transmitted: shared glory in victory, and a lesson in humanity, kindness toward the vanquished. And Velasquez created a lovely moment even while overwhelming the viewer with grand scope. Here you have the judgment of a patron that the artist had an intellect that could grasp his purpose, even magnify it. But today most art is created without patrons, and the viewer is alone deciding whether the mind he is entertaining for the moment is worthy. Should he invest time in this artist's imagination?

If words can help the artist make his case, I say use them. If he feels that his image speaks for itself, fine; call it Untitled or give no caption. But if he worries that what he sees in the subject will be missed by most viewers, let a few words help.

The notes on the negative envelope say they were Omar and Isidorio. They had run away from a summer of working in the fields up north to hitch rides and see their country.

I could not remember how we got together with them when I made the book "Mexico 1953: The Roadtrip" back in 2005, but when I finally found Fred Chez, my traveling companion, after 52 years of not being in touch, he said "Don't you remember? Mr. Villa Lobos met them in a park as we were walking with him in Tepic, and when he found out what they were doing, asked us to give them a ride. You didn't want to, because of all the camera equipment and there being no back seat in the car, just a metal trunk. Mr. Villa Lobos said, 'Look, I trusted you, didn't I? Won't you trust these boys?'" No wonder I forgot. He put us to shame. The two turned out to be good company, funny and helpful, for the next couple of weeks.

Well, I guess I can continue showing the raw shots from the road trip in 1953 while also discussing the issues that intrigue me about art photography.

The above is where we first encountered Mexico's vulcanism on the way down the west coast. Not far south of Tepic is the Ceboruco lava field, remnant of an extinct volcano. Here is the first place my negatives show the presence of two high school boys who traveled with us for a while. I asked them to be in the picture with Fred, because the photo without them had no scale: it was hard to see how big the boulders were.