These video clips are from the memoirs of Maggie, a 50-something colleague whom I consider to be, and delightfully so, the polar opposite from me in her reading of family portraits. This woman possesses a tremendous, palpable pride in her family of 9 siblings and a father who was a Lutheran minister in Cambridge, MA for many decades.
I asked Maggie if I could film her talking about her family photographs and she welcomed me and my cameras into her home on a snowy Sunday evening. I have worked with Maggie for 8 years and the verbal memoirs of her family she casually shares with me are always fascinating and entertaining. I am encouraging her to write down her these memoirs that are so heartwarming, yet excruciatingly honest.
To me, this photo of Maggie’s father to me indicates an older man finding great peace and pleasure in his natural surroundings. It has a reassuring quality invoking pleasurable thoughts of contentment in maturity. Maggie’s description is poignant in the obvious love she feels for this man (who lived into his 90′s) and her lifetime of frustration with his proud and cerebral personality.
When Maggie showed me this photograph, I thought it must be of some aging hippy-liberal relative. I loved its sass and spunk, but its real story is about an incredibly strong woman who honored her free spirit while being a minister’s wife and mother of ten.
This next portrait could be a 1950′s advertisement for the Boy Scouts. The children look wholesome, attractive and sincere; the parents appear hardworking and proud. Everyone looks well scrubbed and polite. Meeting these people through Maggie’s incredible memory give them dimensions of pain, frustration and complexity. Her reading becomes my reading; her truth, my truth.
