An American Family

An American Family  (2002)

This is a series of five, including a time-based, installation in Series II. The complete series includes 13 images. As photographer in the family, my father's old negatives came to me. I was amazed by what I found. No one, including my father, had ever thought of him as a photographer, and yet, a high percentage of his images are classic compositions. In our lifetime, I wish that we had had some photographic discussions, but neither of us realized that we had this other side of ourselves in common. 

An interesting piece to this multi-layered project, is that through resequencing and recontextualizing, I am able to use my father's images to tell my family story - a story, which he wouldn't have wanted told. And yet, there it is before all of us, captured by him, through his lens. How well I remember that Easter Sunday out on our screened-in porch in Baltimore, so many years ago. In "AN AMERICAN FAMILY, Series IV," the first image on the left appears to be a happy family. The image on the right was taken two seconds later. The scene was excruciatingly painful. 

The viewer can see my protest against my father's command to "look at the camera." I refused. What I had no way of knowing, at the time but am astounded by now, are the extremes, expressed in the faces and the body language of myself and the others. Viewers may not know exactly what is going on, but they get that "something's wrong." There is something very disturbing. The woman in the left-hand image, out on the left edge was a visitor. My mother is in the center. But, the truth of our family picture is in the right image. "The Visitor'' became my father's muse, effectively displacing my mother, sending her to the outer perimeter. My father directed the arrangement in the photograph as he did in real life. The whole family story is told in these two frames.