I may have mentioned that my mom and I have been working on an album as a way to organize the hundreds of old photographs my grandmother had stashed in a suitcase upstairs. Many of the images are quite beautiful and amusing while others are quite sad. These are two of my favorites:
This photograph has obviously been torn away from its backing board and in texture and weight is more like fabric than a photograph. The image shows a group of women who made up the Coleta Household Society. My grandmother is the little baby in the lower right hand corner and my great grandmother is standing directly abover her.
This photograph is the only picture of my grand mother and some of her brothers and sisters as children. L to R: Eleanor, my grandmother, Frank, and Herb. The photograph itself is an interesting object as it appears that it was once folded and broken into several sections, thus necessitating the use of glue to attach it to another piece of paper. There are many aspects of this particular photograph I find fascinating, but the postures and spaces between the children are what draw me inside the image. Frank and my grandmother were always particularly close.
“We all have two lives: the real one which was our childhood dream and which we still dream about in adult life, though it is set against a background of fog… and the false one which we experience in our relationship with others: the practical, useful life in which we are finally laid into a coffin.
In the other life, there are no coffins or corpses, there are only illustrations from childhood: great colored books which are meant to be looked at, not read… in the other life we are ourselves, in the other life we live: while in this one, we die.” – Fernando Pessoa (from Kate’s Studio)