Photography.

I post a lot of photos, most of them from a big collection of slides my dad shot from the late 50s through the 60s and had digitized several years ago. Dad was an accomplished and talented, and, at that time prolific, photographer, and many of his photographs are by any standard excellent.

But we all loved taking pictures. My first camera was a Brownie that my dad gave me when I was around 9 or 10. I loved that camera and, in retrospect, am very moved to see all the little and big ways my parents encouraged every creative impulse I had. Dad taught me all about how photography works, how to focus and compose a shot, how to develop the film in his basement darkroom. (His inflexibility regarding what makes a good photo probably pushed me away from photography but likely pushed me toward other modes of expression that he knew less about, like visual art and theater.)

My Grandma Lenore always had a cheap Instamatic camera with her and was always trying to get everyone in the same room so she could take a “family portrait.” And I got a cheap camera too, once I got to about high school age. Growing up, there were always cameras around and there was always my dad telling everyone they were doing it wrong. And there were always lots of photos and photo albums and lots of trips to the Fotomat. Most are not what you’d call “good” photos, but I treasure them.

You can always tell Grandma Lenore’s photos because the subject is half out of the frame and there’s a big sort of blank area taking up most of the image. This drove my dad crazy. I guess they actually are pretty terrible photos, as photos — the above is not intentionally a photo of 3 ships on a wall, but I sure am glad to have a photo of those ships — still I love them I suppose mostly because they make me think of Grandma Lenore, but there’s also something wonderful and dynamic about the weird framing, like the camera is trying to escape her hands.

(The kid on the left is Mark King who lived down the street. Once my brother and I were at his house for a sleepover. In my memory it’s around Christmastime but memory is unreliable. We were in the basement, in sleeping bags but not sleeping, talking and laughing, it was very late. Mark’s father burst through the door at the top of the stairs, dragged Mark out of bed, took off his shoe and beat the crap out of him with it. Mike and I were terrified and didn’t say a word. Everybody beat their kids back then, but Mark’s dad was especially harsh. Back then, we called it “strict.”)

In the photo above, I’m wearing a sweater vest Grandma Lenore crocheted for me. By the early 70s, she’d more or less given up painting and entered a long phase of compulsive crocheting. Everyone she knew had piles of odd-shaped “blankets” in odd, unplanned, color combinations and proportions. She made ponchos for my sister, hats she called tams for EVERYONE, and sweater vests for me and my brother. Ugly is not even the word.. I knew that at 10, but it was a painful dilemma for me because I so worshipped Grandma Lenore. I had to wear them. And to school. To not would have been a serious betrayal. But I mean, look at that thing.

Grandma Lenore taught me to crochet and I also became a little compulsive about it. I totally sympathized with Grandma. Crocheting was fun, but patterns and planning and all that were not. (The most ambitious I got was, around the age of 12 or 13, I crocheted a new wardrobe for my sister’s Barbies. I liked small projects I could finish in a day or two.)

I’m guessing Mom took this one. Her sense of composition was also, by Dad’s standard, lacking, but it wasn’t as crazy as Grandma Lenore’s. That’s Grandma Lenore of course in the spider web dress. The tree is the same tree as the one in the shot above. Around the time my sister was born, we got an artificial tree which lasted well into my 20s, maybe longer.

These 3 photos happen to be from one of my grandmother’s scrapbooks, which I took when she died. She often wrote directly on photographs, dates and names, I guess so no one would forget. I used to think it was overkill, but I appreciate it now because, though I don’t forget who these people are, I often have trouble pinpointing dates.