Years in Review — A Personal Look
Our Sunday New York Times had a massive separate section called The Year In Pictures. I was not too interested in looking at it but I did.
When I did look at it I did notice one page that had 7 or 8 portraits of women of the US congress. The rest were photographs taken by newspaper photographers. I longed for photographs by Avedon, or Newton, Bert Stern, photographers with recognizable styles.
I became depressed as I do every time in December with all those lists of the best pictures, ballets, and concerts of the year.
Why I get depressed with these lists is something I cannot pin down. I do know that the Mayan numerical system was in base 12 while ours is in base ten. So we think (in spite of 12 months in one year) in decades and centuries.
I gave all the above some thought and I came up with the reason for my pictorial melancholy. I would want to look at the photographs that I have taken this year that are memorable to me. Social media has popularized the sharing of other people’s stuff in the form of YouTube videos or articles in newspapers or books. There is very little personal content with the questionable exception of boring and mostly banal selfies.
So for this year, this December of 2019 I will have here a Years In Review featuring my eldest daughter Alexandra Elizabeth Waterhouse-Hayward. I can look at them and every one of them brings me a memory of the time and place and even the smells of a Hawaiian beach or the port of Veracruz.
With sister Hilary Anne
With our grandaughter Rebecca Anne Stewart
