She went out to photograph the lost villages in the great city’s misery, and there she found herself, in the very act of photographing something totally alien to her own life. She found herself because she did not deny her fear, all alone with her Leica, of penetrating a world that lived in poverty but revealed itself in crime, first a man stabbed to death on a street of unquiet dust; fear of the ambulances with the howling, deafening noise of their sirens at the very edge of the territory of crime; women stomped to death by drunken husbands; newborn babies tossed on garbage dumps; old people abandoned and found dead on mats that later were used as their shrouds, stuck in a hole in the ground a week later, their bodies so dry that they didn’t even smell. Laura Díaz photographed all that and thanked Juan Francisco, despite everything, for having saved her from such a fate, the fate of the violence and misery around her.
She would go into a tavern in a lost city and find all the men shot to death, all having inexplicably killed each other as if in a caroming series of crimes, all anonymous-but now saved from oblivion by Laura’s photographs. She thanked Jorge Maura for having saved her from the violence of ideologies, from the fear a woman might have of the world of thought he had introduced her to. In her memory she had an impossible photo-of Jorge licking the monastery floor in Lanzarote, cleansing his own spirit of ideologies and of the bloody twentieth century.
Jorge Maura was the antidote to the violence the abandoned children lived in; she photographed them in sewers and tunnels, surprising their inexpungible beauty of childhood, as if her camera cleansed them the way Jorge had cleansed the monastery floor, children cleansed of snot, rheum, greasy hair, rachitic arms, heads hairless from mange, hands discolored by pinta, the tropical skin disease, bare feet with crusts of mud as their only shoes. And when she photographed them she also thanked Harry for the weakness of loyalties and for nostalgia for the unique, unrepeatable moment of heroism. She thought about the great photograph of the fallen Republican soldier taken by Robert Capa during the Spanish Civil War.
She’d turn up at local police stations and at hospitals. No one took any notice of an old, gray-haired lady with full skirts and worn-out sandals (it was she). They let her photograph a woman, not breathing, with an empty Coca-Cola bottle jammed between her thighs, a drug addict in his cell twisted with pain, scratching the walls and stuffing saltpeter into his nose, men and women beaten in their houses or in some alley, it was all the same, bloody, blinded by disorientation more than because their eyes were swollen from punches, clubbings, the arrival of the Black Marias, the entrance into the police station of whores and fags, transvestites and drug dealers, the nightly harvest of pimps…
Lives tossed through bar doors, house windows, thrown under the wheels of a bus. Disemboweled lives, with no possible gaze on them but that of Laura Díaz’s camera, Laura herself, Laura burdened with all her memories, her loves and loyalties, but no longer solitary Laura, now instead Laura on her own, dependent on no one, returning his filial checks to Danton, punctually paying the rent for her apartment on Plaza Rio de Janeiro, first selling her individual photographs and her articles to newspapers and magazines and individual buyers, then having her first show in Juan Martín’s gallery on Génova Street, finally under contract as one more star for the Magnum agency, which also represented Cartier-Bresson, Inge Morath, Robert Capa.
The artist of Mexico City’s grief but also its joy, Laura and a newborn boy dressed by his mother’s eyes as if he were the baby Jesus himself, Jesus reborn; Laura and a man with a scarred face and restrained violence piously kissing the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe; Laura on the little pleasures and tragic premonitions of a debutante ball, a wedding, a baptism; Laura’s camera, depicting the instant, managed to depict the future of the instant: that was the strength of her art, an instantaneity with descendants, a plastic eye that restored tenderness and respect to vulgarity, and amorous vulnerability to the harshest violence. It wasn’t only the critics who said it: her admirers felt it, Laura Díaz, almost sixty years of age, is a great Mexican photographer, the best after Alvarez Bravo, high priestess of the invisible, she was called, the poet writing with light, the woman who learned to photograph what Posada could engrave.
When she achieved independence and fame, Laura Díaz kept the photo of the dead Frida for herself, that one she would never give out for publication, that photo was part of her rich, rich memory, the emotional archive of a life that had suddenly, in maturity, flourished like a plant that flowers late but perennially. The photograph of Frida was testimony to all the photographs Laura hadn’t taken in the years she’d lived with others; it was a talisman. Alongside Diego and Frida, without noticing it, as if in a dream, she had gained the artistic sensibility that flourished much later on, when many of the years with Laura Díaz had gone by.
She didn’t complain about that time or condemn it as a calendar of subjection to the world of men, how could she if in her pages lived the two Santiagos, her lovers Jorge Maura, Orlando Ximénez, and Harry Jaffe, her parents, her aunts, the jolly black sweeper Zampayita, and her poor but sympathetic, and (to her) compassionate, husband Juan Francisco? How could she forget them, but how could she not feel sorry that she had not photographed them. She imagined her own eye as a camera able to capture everything it saw and felt over the six decades of her life, and felt a chill of horror. Art was selection. Art meant losing almost everything in exchange for the salvation of very little.
It was impossible to have art and life at the same time, and in the end Laura Díaz was thankful that life had preceded art-for art, premature or even prodigal, might have killed life.
It was when she discovered something that should have been obvious, when she recovered her son Santiago’s paintings and drawings from the rubble of the family house on Avenida Sonora and brought them to her new apartment on Plaza Rio de Janeiro, when in among the mass of pencil and pastel drawings, sketches, and two dozen oil paintings, she discovered the canvas with the naked man and woman staring at each other without touching, desiring only each other but satisfied with the desire.
In her haste to abandon the fallen family home, to set herself up in her new apartment on Plaza Rio de Janeiro, to start her new, independent life, and go out to photograph Mexico City and the lives in it, following, she said to herself, the inspiration of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, Laura had not stopped to take a close look at her own son’s paintings. Perhaps she felt so much love for Santiago the Younger that she preferred to distance herself from the physical proof of her son’s existence in order to keep him alive, if only in his mother’s soul. Perhaps she had to discover her own vocation to rediscover her son’s. Busy arranging her own photos, she went on to arrange Santiago’s paintings and drawings, and among the two dozen oils, this one, the naked couple staring at each other without touching, held her attention.