A quick writing assignment for ART235- Photo Imaging
It was a quiet weekend morning in the Leahy kitchen. The television hummed Saturday morning cartoons softly from the living room, and a morning chill was seeping through the propped windows. Mom was in the sun room huddled in her favorite knit blanket that dwarfed her form in its own chunky existence, drinking coffee and reading the latest book club pick. Dylan, my older brother, was snoring away the newly-found stresses of his first year in high-school. My 12 year-old-self was in the kitchen absent-mindedly gnawing on Frosted Flakes as I watched Spongebob and Patrick attempt to raise a baby clam. Dad was in his office, where the click-clack of his keyboard usually competed with my television-viewing. Since my older two siblings left for college, this was our weekend routine. But today, an anomaly presented as I heard my dad’s fervent typing cease. He surfaced from the depths of his office and walked down the hallway towards the kitchen carrying a tomb of a book. I looked up from my soggy breakfast as he asked if he could read me something.
He stood in the center of the kitchen and read several passages of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay, Self-Reliance. I have fleeting memories of passages he highlighted as paramount, “To be great is to be misunderstood.” I remember hearing sentences that made little sense to my pre-teen’s mind, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” And I will always recall his favorite excerpt which he read with such eloquence and reverence, “These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day.” From my seat, my view of my father’s face was obscured by the book’s edge. I can recall his glasses sliding down the bridge of his nose. He was the philosopher in the amphitheater of our kitchen. Somewhere between Spongebob’s cackles and my brother’s snores, his discourses were witnessed by empty kitchen chairs and myself. In the moment I would have never thought to take a picture because of the sacredness of the moment. But the image remains in my memory of my father’s hands cradling the binding of the book and the warmness in his eyes as he shared what he considered precious wisdom with me, his youngest child.
Photographs are significant not only in their ability to document a single moment in time, but to represent the photographer’s interpretation of that moment. In my photograph, I would chose to captured my father reading out loud from my spot on the seat. This is a slight manipulation of reality as the shot would peer up at my father in a sense of admiration. This angle would also enhance my interpretation of him as preaching, as a minister would do from a pulpit. The photograph reflects not only my feelings in this moment, but a portrait of how I still perceive one of the most important people in my life. In this image, my dad, the hard-working salesman and family man, has escaped from the soul-crushing tedium of daily duties through the simple, serendipitous gesture of dusting off an old book. As Marvin Heiferman suggests in his article Photography Changes Everything, memories, like photographs, are fluid, easily manipulated and often mis-interpreted. Perhaps in my mind, I have glorified this image of my father to strengthen the memory of a moment eight years passed. But whether through the lense of my mind’s eye or the lense of the camera, I have captured in a single moment what my father has worked his entire life to be- the kind-hearted philosopher, passionate about life, and longing to reach out to those around him.
Sound & Sweet 