By June of 1957, Raymond’s success as a commercial photographer was well established and he hungered to travel to a country where he could call on his creative vision to just “see and photograph,” not the commerce,  as in the good old days when Lisette Model was his teacher in the early 1950s.  Off to Mexico we went in late June 1957 for nearly a month.  Our arrival in Mexico City was the equivalent of stepping into a Claude Monet painting with lots of color and plenty of noise.  While black-and-white film had been his early preference, color was on his mind at this stage of his development and color is what he got.

The color, the beauty of the subject matter everywhere we looked, was addictive.  I heard nothing but the non-stop click, click of his 35 mm camera as he managed to capture the essence and poignant humanity of the beautiful Mexican people, especially the children and the fantastic beauty and history of that amazing country that caught his sensitive eye.   We travelled everywhere, north, east, south, west, never getting enough of the richness of the country and the beauty of its people.  - Eleanor Jacobs