10 Edgewater
Each work in this series is a pair of
photographs. The first in each
pair was shot by either my mother or my
father in the late 1960s. The
second in each pair was shot by me in 2004
from the same angle and
vantage point of the same place.
In ways both obvious and invisible, these
works belong as much to my
parents as to me. They met when they were
both teaching
junior high
school in Greenwich, Connecticut. Their
faculty romance yielded two
sons and a marriage that continues to this
day. Just before I (their
first child) was born, they bought a
little house in town on Edgewater
Drive. In the two years or so that we
lived there before moving on,
they shot a few hundred Kodachrome slides
in and around the house. When
they sold the house in the summer of 2004,
I realized I wanted to
re-photograph some scenes of those slides.
I met up with my father in the vacant
building four days before its
ownership changed hands. At my request, he
had brought the pictures and
we projected them on a wall that appears
in some of the slides,
revisiting the rooms of their origin when
it seemed necessary. With
help from him and, via telephone, my
mother, I spent the next three
days choosing my favorites and re-staging
them, minus the people, by
finding the vantage point and angle from
which they’d been shot.
Working slowly with a geared tripod head
and the precise movements of a
4 x 5 view camera, I found that, under the
dark cloth, I could use one
eye to view an illuminated slide and the
other eye to view the
illuminated ground glass, simultaneously
looking at different times of
the same space, as it were, adjusting
their positions until they
coincided. By closing one eye or the
other, I could make very young
versions of myself or my parents reappear
or disappear from the scene
right in front of me.
I don’t remember living in this house
because I was so young when I
left it, but I came to feel attached to
the place by working on it.
John Locke claimed that we come to own
things by mixing our labor with
them; ever since I was nine or so, I
helped my parents (and later my
brother) to own that house between
tenants—scrubbing, hosing, scraping,
priming, and painting its vacant rooms.
Not so different from
struggling to compose a photograph with a
view camera, or to print one,
in some ways. I learned to use tools in
that house; I learned how to
work on empty spaces.
Click
here to
see these pictures.
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