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Elsa Dorfman's Photography Reviews: part of http://elsa.photo.net
by Nancy Andrews
San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994, unpaginated, $25.00 paper.
by Mariana Cook
San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994, 132 pp., $35.00 hardcover, $19.95
paper.
Reviews by Elsa Dorfman
Originally published in The Women's Review of Books, September
1994
These two books are each very successful at what they do. The title
of Nancy Andrews' book, Family, she explains, is slang for "gay"
in many parts of the country, and derives from the fact that gay eople
turn to others like themselves to form a "family". Andrews wanted to make
the book that she looked for eight years ago when she began to realize
that she was gay but her head "was filled with only gay stereotypes. These
stereotypes didn't fit my self-image," she writes, "and I began to feel
the need to learn more about myself and others like me."
Andrews is a photographer for the Washington Post. She stays
a little hidden in her book, despite her introduction. There is no picture
of her with her camera or her tape recorder, and she tells us only a little
bit about her procedure: "As I searched for subjects, I operated under
the assumption that I could find gay people anywhere; the only difficulty
would be their willingness to be photographed. I wanted to show a reflection
of America, from the politician to the Elvis impersonator."
I wish Andrews had said more about how she went about photographing
and interviewing - and finding - her subjects. Was this the first time
she used a tape recorder? How long were the interviews? What are her ideas
about portraiture? How many of the people she photographed did she edit
out of the book? How big a part do portraits play in her news photography?
Does she consider herself a portrait photographer or a photojournalist?
How much of a struggle was it to get this book done while holding down
a high-pressure job? Did she meet many people who were reluctant to be
photographed?
Judging by the credits at the back of the book, which include 180 people
and organizations, it seems that Andrews found her subjects by word of
mouth. She was attracted to most of them because of their stories and because
they could express themselves, verbally and visually, not because they
had a national reputation. Everyone seems very likable. Although she says
that almost all of the men she photographed mentioned AIDS (and a few of
the women did), a sense of the disease and community loss does not hover
over her image or her text. Everyone looks very healthy, even the people
who mention that they are infected.
Almost every one of the portraits works perfectly with the text. The
images are varied: several are in the person's home or garden or restaurant
hangout. Some are classic close-up portraits, but most of Andrews' work
shows the versatility of the photojournalist who is interested in the subject's
environment as much as the face and body. Each of her people becomes a
short story, mostly about coming out to family and friends or dealing with
the workplace. Her portraits make me want to read what the people have
to say and the interviews make me scrutinize the portraits.
I wished, though, that the interviews had gone beyond the allotted page
or so. Bruce Hayes, who won a medal in the 1984 Olympics, comments: I began
suspecting I was gay when I went to college, but I really repressed it.
Swimming was a good way to do that because I had my head in the water six
hours a day. I just didn't think about it. Swimming provided a convenient
excuse. I certainly was aware that I was attracted to other men at that
time. But that was too scary a thought to actually put into action. I was
in an environment, sports, which is very homophobic, very competitive,
very cutthroat in many ways. It's not something I thought I could handle
and compete at the same time. Ruth Ellis was born in 1899 and lived with
her girlfriend, Babe Franklin, for 34 years. Babe was a cook and Ruth ran
a print shop out of their house. Babe died in 1975; now Ruth lives in a
senior citizens' building in Detroit.
I guess I knew I was a lesbian in high school because I fell
in love with my gym teacher. Now, she didn't know it though, but that was
my love. I couldn't do anything, just admired her, that's all. All to myself.
I didn't know anything about lesbian or gay people. I tried to find out
what we did. I tried to hang around some sportin' women because I figured
they would know, but they just laughed me off. They wouldn't tell me nothin'.
Jean Mills and Carol Eichelberger farm the land Jean's father cleared by
hand with a mule. The two provide organically grown vegetables for the
one hundred families in the Tuscaloosa County Community Supported Agriculture,
a coop the couple created four years ago. Carol writes:
Jean may be living up here with this strange woman, but she
is doing something that they recognize and value. They'll come by and say,
"Remember those collards you gave me last year? Well, you have any of 'em
this year?" These old men, they always talk. They'll have garden talk.
They'll want to know what we've got up.
Glenn Burke is one of my favorite portraits and interviews in the book.
He played with the Dodgers in the 1977 World Series and reports that the
Dodgers offered him a bonus if he would get married. Not long after that
he was traded to Oakland, and after a few years with the A's, he left professional
baseball.
The first time it registered that I liked men I was in a mixed
bar and there were men dancing with men. I said, "Ah-hah, I finally found
it." I thought I was the only gay person in the world...I had to be a little
bit better just in case they did find out. I was always thinking about
it... In 1978, when I got traded to the Oakland A's, a player came up to
me and said, "They're talking and saying that you're gay. I don't care
if you are or not, you're still my friend." You can imagine how that made
me feel. So I didn't find out until after I got to Oakland that the gossip
was I was gay and that's why the Dodgers traded me. It takes a lot to play
professional baseball. It was more fun getting there than being there.
Since Andrews had her younger self in mind when she set out to do the book,
it surprised me that only a third of the portraits are of women and that
only one young woman was included. I also thought that since the book was
intended to be inspiring for gay people it was odd that Andrews used portraits
and interviews of people who didn't want to be identified by name at all
or who would only be identified by their first names. Other people are
obscured by their pet or instrument or the lighting - or they're photographed
from the back or from the head down. The photographs work as portraits,
but they send a weird, contradictory message. The portrait without the
head is one of a man holding the infant (its back to the camera) he fathered
with a lesbian couple. It's a big country, and I know that there are many
such families who would have been happy to face the camera.
A lot of people are photographed without their partners, though it's
clear from the interviews that they have a partner. But if Andrews was
trying to show how gay life works and that gay life does work, and if she
was trying to show the expanded notion of "family," it would have made
sense to include many more partners. By only mentioning them, she ends
up implying that some of those close to her subjects didn't want to be
identified as a gay partner or as part of a gay family. It gives a paradoxical
sense of singleness to a book called Family.
The book, although five dollars more than Mariana Cook's, isn't as well
designed, edited, or produced, and is narrower and shorter by an inch or
so. That inch really matters, because almost half of the images in the
book run across the gutter in the middle by just about an inch. It is impossible
to get a sense of integrity of the image when that happens. In almost every
case the images could have been cropped close to the gutter without compromising
them.
Mariana Cook takes portraits of fathers and daughters. The impetus for
her book came from her strong attachment to her father , who was 45 years
old when she was born, and is now in his eighties. "[I]t occurred to me,"
she writes,
that he could not live forever. My best friend was aging. I
became fascinated with every father and daughter I saw. I was anxious to
understand their feelings for each other and wondered if their experiences
were similar or different from ours. These pictures were made as an exploration.
(p. 130)
Fathers and Daughters includes seventy dad/daughter combos. Everyone
is identified by their profession and where they live. The effect of these
apparently simple tag lines is to give the book an upper-class air and
to suggest that nobody in this book is, god forbid, without accomplishment.
Nobody has a boring job and nobody lives in a boring place.
The book doesn't pull you in much beyond the portraits, though these
are very good. Cook is an experienced portrait photographer. Occasionally
her subjects are in a leafy garden which has an enclosed feeling to it,
but her preference is to photograph people in front of a jet-black background,
which also creates an intimate arena. (When, rarely, she strays from a
stage she is less successful.) Her subjects are impeccably lit, making
them all look wonderful. Sometimes the studio lighting is absolutely unearthly
in its contrast with the enveloping blackness of the background, as in
the portrait of printer Thomas Palmer of Newport and his daughters Luned
and Rosamund.
Of course, there are startling resemblances: Jacques Attali, a writer
from Paris, and his daughter Bethsabee; David Ankrum, an actor in Los Angeles,
and daughter Challee; New York art dealer Leo Catelli and his daughter
Nina Sundell, an arts administrator and curator. A few of the pairs allow
for some humor: writer Niccolo Tucci and his daughter Maria Gottlieb, the
actress; The Very Reverend James Parks Morton and Sophia Morton, the actress;
New Mexico writers Charles and Carola Bell; Paris booksellers Andre and
Isabelle Jammes.
The camera comes in close, friendly, interested mostly in the faces
and the affectionate bond. Just about every pair seems very proud of each
other and comfortable together. Comfort seems to be what the book is about.
The exception is the portrait of writer Carlos Fuentes and his daughter
Natasha, who, he writes, is in a final, painful moment of adolescence.
The portrait shows Natasha's pain, partly because its composition is unbalanced
(the only such image in the book). The text, written by Carlos, is beautiful
but whiny - all about his disappointment in Natasha, his errors in bringing
her up, his fears for her and at the same time his admiration: "But now
she has become so beautiful that she also occupies my imagination and my
next novel, La Novia Muerta, is dedicated to her, to her enigma."
Couldn't Cook cajole a few words from Natasha? (Even "Give me a break"
would have done it.)
The subtitle of Fathers and Daughters is "In Their Own Words,"
which seems to mean that Cook sent her subjects a questionnaire and edited
their replies. Too bad, because this is the weakest part of the book. (A
few people - mathematician Israel Gelfand, cellist YoYo Ma, poet Derek
Walcott and Senator Bill Bradley - apparently didn't get theirs in on time.)
Cook would have had a more substantial book if she had interviewed her
subjects herself or if she had worked with her subjects herself or if she
had worked with a collaborator who did the interviewing and provided the
text.
Most of the fathers adore their daughters, are mystified by them, wish
they were closer, feel they know unearthly secrets. Attali wrote:
Her questions are coming from the end of the ages. Her silences
are the slow heritage of uncertain millenniums [sic]. Her words are whispered
as if she knew for a very short time all that - too soon - life will make
her forget. Her answers, coming from the distant future, help me to understand
what I desperately try to grasp from a flying past. (p.25)
The fathers of older women are glad their worrying days are over and that
their daughters turned out okay. What else is new? And most of the daughters
think they have the best daddy in the world. Composer Rebeca Mauleon of
San Francisco writes her dad Isodoro, a professor of Spanish literature:
My father is unlike any other person I know. If I had to choose
adjectives to describe him, I guess those that would be somewhat appropriate
include intelligent, wise, sensitive, hot-tempered, impatient, passionate,
eccentric, creative, and proud, just to name a few. (p.112)
Some of the text goes beyond chitchat. Cultural anthropologist Vincent
Crapanzano and Aleksandra wrote a dialogue. Colin Salmon, the English actor,
sent a song his mother sang to him; composer Allen Shawn and Annie wrote
a score. The most interesting and thoughtful daughter response is from
Nancy Blackmun Coniaris, a clinical psychologist in New York City and daughter
of The Honorable Harry A. Blackmun, retired Supreme Court Justice. At two
pages it is longer by far than the others, and shows how wonderful the
text of this book might have been.
It is exciting, and I am proud, but there are costs. It is
impossible, for example, to separate out whether, or how much, it matters
to some people whose daughter I am. Such a parent becomes a kind of commodity,
and arrangements with others and within oneself can begin to feel more
like business deals than relationships. There is also living in his shadow.
No matter what one does, it can't compare. Perhaps the hardest thing is
having to compete with the nation's business. Who am I in the face of issues
affecting whole big groups, even millions of people? (p.80)
Neither Andrews nor Cook talks about carrying out her project in terms
of being a woman portrait photographer. In fact, neither book calls attention
to the fact that it is the work of a woman. Cook's book could easily have
been subtitled "A woman looks at the father-daughter relationship" and
Andrews' could have been subtitled "A gay woman looks at the gay world."
That is how each book would have been presented in the seventies (and neither
would have used the images selected for these books' covers). In the foreword
of each book, published back then, there would have been a discussion of
"a woman's eye." How come all that has disappeared? Do Cook and Andrews
(born in 1955 and 1963) think that their gender is irrelevant to the way
they work and the way their work comes out? Do William Styron, who wrote
the introduction to Fathers and Daughters, and Eric Marcus, who
wrote the introduction to Family, think any part of the sensibility
they each applaud is connected to gender? I do.
elsad@comcast.net
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