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Assignment, Assignment 5 - My Mother's Life

Assignment 5 – A Very Private Lady

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Assignment 5 is the final piece of work for Identity and Place and is a self-directed assignment.  Identity and Place as a unit is about thinking about how to tell stories of people, their lives and how the place they come from effects that.

While I was working on the unit my mother died and I found myself going though all her belongings. She never threw anything away. I found a massive collection of photographs from her childhood on, together with ones of her family, friends and all the places she had been to.  Most of these I had never seen before. They were collected in the traditional manner- not filed or sorted in any way but left in old print envelopes and stored in shoeboxes. Very few were labelled (and of the labelled envelopes some were clearly wrong – presumably reused). There was one early album that had a few of the people named that went up to about 1945.  Mixed in with the photographs were postcards, cuttings from newspapers, tickets, bills of sale for every house she had lived in and letters. I also found a written story of her and her family’s life up to the end of WWII that had partly been written by her and partly by one of her brothers and  a copy of a dissertation done by my cousin which told the hidden story of the treatment of Germans in America in WWII and the internment of many of them which included quotes from my mother and her family.

My mother had always been very reluctant to talk about her past life and I knew very little of it. In the final months of her life she had agreed to talk a little and we recorded what she said.

Assignment 5 is made up of some of her verbal story, 7 minutes cut from 2 hours of recording, together with a small fraction of the vast archive of pictures and memorabilia she had collected. Some of the photographs are captioned with explanations from her written story.

This piece leads directly on from the video I made for Exercise 4.5 – My Mother’s Memories. In that case I was interpreting my emotions about her words though my own images, while here I am using her own archives to tell the story more directly. It is more factual, more telling and I find it almost unbearable to watch.

Research:

Much of the research for this comes from the work done earlier in IAP and is described in Assignment 4. I have also looked at archival work and read the fascinating essay on it by Thinking about Archives by Susan Breakell. To some extent I approached this as a curator/archivist and so found the discussion I attended on this type of work by Susan Bright (see: Susan Bright Lecture) helpful for background knowledge. I have found several photographers work fed directly into my thoughts on how to present work that is essentially a memory piece and a tribute.  Murmurs by Martina Lindqvist talks about what is important at the end of life. Mother by Paul Graham (Graham, 2019) I find almost unbearably poignant. Larry Sultan in Pictures from Home (Sultan, 2017) was inspiring in its mix of found snapshots, storytelling and new photography. Deborah Orloff in Elusive Memory (Orloff, s.d.) talks about the connection between photographs and memory as do both Marianne Hirsch – Family Frames (Hirsch, 2012) and Annette Kuhn – Family secrets (Kuhn, 2002).

I have also done some research into the ways other people have used familial archives to produce pieces of work. Michael Abrams – Welcome to Springfield (Abrams, 2012)invented a whole story about a fictional town.  Daniel Meadows – Digital Stories (Meadows, s.d.)used his own memories and archive photos to produce short videos. Jim Goldberg – Gene (Goldberg, 2018) used the archive and story of an elderly man in Gene to tell about life and memories at old age, not dissimilar to the work of Julian Germain in  For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness (Germain and Snelling, 2011). Alexia Webster – Tracing Lives (Webster, 2020) and Catherine Panebianco (Panebianco, s.d.) both repurposed family images and mixed them with present day images to tell their personal stories.

Planning:

I considered two ways of showing this

  • A video
  • A photobook with short quotes from her words
  • I eventually decided on a video because I felt that actually hearing her talk about her experiences was important, as her voice echoes her emotions.
  • Following discussion and feedback from the online IAP support network I have also made a photobook (a work in progress) from the images and others to form a lasting record for our family (see: Further Reflection on Assignment 5 with Added Book – My Mother’s Story)

Practice:

  • I did a written transcript of all the recordings, then ordered them in time and tried to pick out the most important pieces. This was difficult and the recording could have easily lasted 20 minutes or more to give the details.
  • The level of her voice varies, partly I think due to how tired she was at any given moment, but also to how difficult she was finding telling some parts of the story.
  • I then went through all her collected memorabilia and found the photographs and cuttings that were relevant to this time period.
  • I made a version on a black background and on a white one. I eventually chose the black as it seemed to be clearer and fit the subject matter better.
  • The video was uploaded to Vimeo
  • Following feedback from my tutor I added a slightly more personal touch at the beginning and end of the original video.

Video:

Learning Points:

  • Looking though archives takes a long time, and you need to be ruthless about choosing images/memorabilia to use
  • This might have been a better project to do when I had achieved some emotional distance
  • It is very difficult to decide what is of more general interest against specific family interest
  • Small and old snapshots are hard to enlarge successfully as every mark shows
    • But – are the marks actually part of the story?
  • I need to start to archive (note use of the noun archive as a verb) my own work more carefully with more tags and names attached to people
  • Feedback from both peers and tutor really helps to make a more coherent piece of work.

Summary:

This was a difficult piece of work to do and I am not convinced I have done it justice. I may yet rework it in the future. When reading the latest aperture I came across this quote ‘The archive is one of the spaces where that exchange takes place, where the living go to encounter the dead. It’s a strange business, summoning ghosts. For the most part the work is repetitive, an orderly, laborious process of logging and transcribing. But every once in a while, something happens. You look down, and beneath the surface someone looks back’ (Laing, 2020).

References:

Abrams, M. (2012) Welcome to Springfield. Washington, D.C.: Loosestrife Editions.

Germain, J. and Snelling, C. (2011) For every minute you are angry you lose sixty seconds of happiness: portrait of an elderly gentleman. (Second edition) London: Mack.

Goldberg (2018) Jim Goldberg’s New Book is a Tender Portrait of Old Age • Magnum Photos. At: https://www.magnumphotos.com/arts-culture/society-arts-culture/jim-goldberg-gene/ (Accessed 09/09/2020).

Graham, P. (2019) Mother. London: MACK.

Hirsch, M. (2012) Family frames: photography, narrative, and postmemory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Kuhn, A. (2002) Family secrets: acts of memory and imagination. (New ed) London; New York: Verso.

Laing, O. (2020) ‘A Fold in Time’ In: aperture 239 p.95

Meadows, D. (s.d.) Digital Stories on Vimeo. At: https://vimeo.com/showcase/5268983 (Accessed 10/09/2020).

Orloff, D. (s.d.) Deborah Orloff. At: http://deborahorloff.com/ (Accessed 10/08/2020).

Panebianco, C. (s.d.) catherine panebianco. At: http://www.catherinepanebianco.com (Accessed 09/09/2020).

Sultan, L. (ed.) (2017) Pictures from home – Larry Sultan. London: Mack.

Webster, A. (2020) ‘Tracing lives: a visual response to coronavirus’ In: The Guardian 26/06/2020 At: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jun/26/tracing-lives-visual-response-to-coronavirus (Accessed 30/08/2020).

Assignment 5 - My Mother's Life

Assignment 5

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Assignment 5 is the final piece of work for Identity and Place and is a self-directed assignment.  Identity and Place as a unit is about thinking about how to tell stories of people, their lives and how the place they come from effects that.

While I was working on the unit my mother died and I found myself going though all her belongings. She never threw anything away. I found a massive collection of photographs from her childhood on, together with ones of her family, friends and all the places she had been to.  Most of these I had never seen before. They were collected in the traditional manner- not filed or sorted in any way but left in old print envelopes and stored in shoeboxes. Very few were labelled (and of the labelled envelopes some were clearly wrong – presumably reused). There was one early album that had a few of the people named that went up to about 1945.  Mixed in with the photographs were postcards, cuttings from newspapers, tickets, bills of sale for every house she had lived in and letters. I also found a written story of her and her family’s life up to the end of WWII that had partly been written by her and partly by one of her brothers and  a copy of a dissertation done by my cousin which told the hidden story of the treatment of Germans in America in WWII and the internment of many of them which included quotes from my mother and her family.

My mother had always been very reluctant to talk about her past life and I knew very little of it. In the final months of her life she had agreed to talk a little and we recorded what she said.

Assignment 5 is made up of some of her verbal story, 7 minutes cut from 2 hours of recording, together with a small fraction of the vast archive of pictures and memorabilia she had collected. Some of the photographs are captioned with explanations from her written story.

This piece leads directly on from the video I made for exercise 4.5. In that case I was interpreting my emotions about her words though my own images, while here I am using her own archives to tell the story more directly. It is more factual, more telling and I find it almost unbearable to watch.

Research:

Much of the research for this comes from the work done earlier in IAP and is described in Assignment 4. I have also looked at archival work and read the fascinating essay on it  Thinking about Archives by Susan Breakell. To some extent I approached this as a curator/archivist and so found the discussion I attended on this type of work – Susan Bright Lecture helpful for background knowledge. An essay I read much earlier in IAP Bates – The Memory of Photography discusses the complex link between memory and photography and also the changing role of photography to record family events. I have found several photographers work fed directly into my thoughts on how to present work that it essentially a memory piece and a tribute.  Murmurs by Martina Lindqvist talks about what is important at the end of life. Mother by Paul Graham (Graham, 2019) I find  impossibly poignant. Larry Sultan in Pictures from Home (Sultan, 2017) was inspiring in its mix of found snapshots, storytelling and new photography. Deborah Orloff, in Elusive Memory (Orloff, s.d.) talks about the connection between photographs and memory as do both Marianne Hirsch – Family Frames (Hirsch, 2012) and Annette Kuhn – Family secrets (Kuhn, 2002).

Planning:

I considered two ways of showing this

  • A video
  • A photobook with short quotes from her words
  • I eventually decided on a video because I felt that actually hearing her talk about her experiences was important, as her voice echoes her emotions.

Practice:

  • I did a written transcript of all the recordings, then ordered them in time and tried to pick out the most important pieces. This was difficult and the recording could have easily lasted 20 minutes or more to give the details.
  • The level of her voice varies, partly I think due to how tired she was at any given moment, but also to how difficult she was finding telling some parts of the story.
  • I then went through all her collected memorabilia and found the photographs and cuttings that were relevant to this time period.
  • The images were then attached to the relevant piece of the story and captioned when it made it clearer.
  • I made a version on a black background and on a white one. I eventually chose the black as it seemed to be clearer and fit the subject matter better.
  • The video was uploaded to Vimeo

Video:

Learning Points:

  • Looking though archives takes a long time, and you need to be ruthless about choosing images/memorabilia to use
  • This might have been a better project to do when I had achieved some emotional distance
  • It is very difficult to decide what is of more general interest against specific family interest
  • Small and old snapshots are to hard to enlarge successfully as every mark shows
    • But – are the marks actually part of the story?
  • I need to start to archive (note use of the noun archive as a verb) my own work more carefully with more tags and names attached to people

References:

Graham, P. (2019) Mother. London: MACK.

Hirsch, M. (2012) Family Frames: photography, narrative, and postmemory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

Kuhn, A. (2002) Family Secrets: acts of memory and imagination. (New ed) London; New York: Verso.

Orloff, D. (s.d.) Deborah Orloff. At: http://deborahorloff.com/ (Accessed 10/08/2020).

Sultan, L. (ed.) (2017) Pictures from Home – Larry Sultan. London: Mack.

Learning Log, Photographers

Larry Sultan

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Larry Sultan (1946 – 2009) was an American photographer who is probably best known for his collaborative work with Mike Mandel which of which the most famous piece is Evidence.

in Evidence Mandel and Sultan collected a series of pictures that were available in the archives at police and fire departments, government bodies and engineering corporations and showed them as fine art pictures. They then collected them into a book, which at the time was extremely controversial, as they claimed authorship of these found pictures. Since then the use of found pictures has become well established either by working with personal or family archives or by finding pictures online and manipulating them.

Sultan says about this work ‘it was very controversial because we had claimed authorship. At that time the word appropriation hadn’t been used in an art context. It came out of a Duchampian strategy of the found object, in this case the found photograph.’ The pictures in Evidence are interesting, not necessarily the most beautiful images, in fact they frequently are not. However, I find at least one of them, which shows the corner of the room and boards in it, fascinating and I could stare at it for hours. Evidence was initially self published however has been reproduced fairly recently in a facsimile version with added essays (Sultan and Mandel, 2018)

Larry Sultan has done much other work. One of his major pieces of work was entitled Pictures from Home which included his words, his own pictures that he took of his family. and also found family memorabilia and snapshots. Sultan describes this work as in his statement about it as ‘What drives me to continue this work is difficult to name. It has more to do with love than with sociology, with being a subject in the drama rather than witness. And in the odd and jumbled process of working, everything shifts; the boundaries blur, my distance slips, the arrogance and illusion of immunity falters. I wake up in the night stunned and anguished’.

larry-sultan-9
Dad with Gold Clubs, 2007 © Estate of Larry Sultan

The images he takes of his family are sometimes staged, sometimes snapshots. They are not necessarily beautiful in anyway, although some are. There is a picture of lawn sprinklers where the light shines through the water. They are everyday images, things that might happen with any family; his mom and dad having a conversation in the driveway with his dad leaning against the car, his  dad scratching his head while carrying a bunch of golf clubs, his dad’s desk scattered with the usual chaotic mess that most desks acquire. All interspersed with snapshots taken across time. He shows images that compare his dad at the same age as ones of himself and comments ‘I always looked younger than he did when he was my age. Perhaps people aged differently prior to the 1960s; can it be that the times we live in leave imprints on our faces and bodies?’

PFH21_SULTAN_Sprinklers_ND-1000x810
Sprinklers © Estate of Larry Sultan

Sultan went on to make several other series of works, for instance, The Valley in which he examines the way pornography and pornographic pictures are taken and how they fit into an apparently suburban lifestyle. Homeland was his last major piece of work in which he hired day labourers as actors in landscape photography. This produced some sublimely beautiful images of people working in the countryside. Showing again the ordinary things of life. About this piece of work, he says, ‘The suburban terrain – both literally and also in terms of being an American photographer thinking about the daily, the ordinary – is what I to go back to’.  One image from this group is simply entitled Creek, Santa Rosa 2007 shows somebody crouched at the edge of a creek with a bucket and some stones while another person wanders away in the background up towards houses. The light on this image is beautiful, it is a very peaceful image and it leaves me wondering what the men were doing with these buckets. Were they collecting water? Were they washing something? Were they trying to make a garden? Another image in the same series Corte Madera Marsh 2009 shows men wading through water against a background of mountains and tall grass. If you look at it very carefully one of the men is walking away into the grass which comes well above his head. Is it grass or are the trees? And does it matter? It is a very gentle picture and one I could look at for a considerable length of time.

SULTAN_Corte_Madera_Marsh_HL_2009_2000px-1200x943
Corte Madera Marsh, 2009 © Estate of Larry Sultan

I find the range of Sultans work fascinating. If, as he suggests he feels ‘alienated from where he lived’ he has managed to show the ordinary, the banal, and the magic of the part of America he lived in. A final quote, ‘Being a photographer allow me to be a witness, to participate in a way that felt right for my blend of being alienated’.

All quotes from the book Larry Sultan – Here and Home (Sultan et al., 2014)

References:

Sultan, L. et al. (eds.) (2014) Larry Sultan: here and home. Los Angeles, California: Munich; London ; New York: Los Angeles County Museum of Art ; Delmonico Books, Prestel.

Sultan, L. and Mandel, M. (eds.) (2018) Evidence. New York: Distributed Art Publishers, Inc.