Cris Mazza
Having Pictures
A moment that was happy, funny, accomplished, interesting, dramatic, successful, meaningful, beautiful, blissful, sublime: Mom wanted a photo—she needed to take a photo—to ensure she would be able to keep those and other unnamable feelings.
I've known people whose parents didn't leave them with stacks of albums and drawers of slides. One, the son of a professional portrait photographer whose "family shots" fit (and were stored) in one shoebox. And another whose parents were raised on dry-farms, so the concept of buying a camera and paying for processing and printing was in the same privileged realm as having a housekeeper. I've also known of people whose parents may in fact have left them a middle-class cache of snapshots and slides, but who themselves didn't seek to document every (even trivial) milestone or new vista (even in their own backyard) with a photo.
It may affect those of us with always-camera-equipped parents more. It also may affect our reminiscences of childhood—the collective one and the differing individual memories. Is my memory of childhood better than that son-of-a-photographer, or just different? Is my drift into nostalgia more gauzy? Mine doesn't even compare to the fanciful memories of the friend whose parents didn't own a camera until he was 8 or 9. Yet maybe not only the existence of Mom's photos, but the reverent care and viewing of photos have added dimensions to my memoires. I can be wistful not just about hot chocolate in tin cups around a campfire in the Sierras, but also about evenings in the living room with photos of Sierra camping projected onto a sparkle-textured screen—five kids and parents engaged in something we called "having pictures." One of us might ask, "Mom, can we have pictures tonight?" Or if Mom had just gotten a new box of slides back from the processor, one of us would shout down the hall to those diligently doing homework, "We're having pictures!"
Viewing the slides as a family may work the same way as taking photos: there are photographed events from my 1st decade I don't remember, except to remember the slide; and a few unphotographed events that I do recall with clear brain-images: We were going to have a "cookout," a barbecue on the patio of the tract house in a mass-produced neighborhood. Already outside at the picnic table, I saw Mom come through the sliding door with a tray holding everything we would need: hotdogs, condiments, even the special salt-and-pepper shakers only used at barbecues because they were pigs with chef hats who oinked when turned upside-down and shaken. Then Mom's feet went wrong or tangled in something, and she went down. I think remember Mom crying. I do remember the spattered trail of mustard and ketchup on the patio, as though I have it on Kodachrome. I also remember we did not have that barbecue. But for another cookout, despite being in our new and "forever" house not in a subdivision, where cookouts were like camp, I only remember the photograph and that it was something we did more than once, but I don't specifically remember the actual event(s).
With my own photo-enhanced and photo-impaired memory examples, I am only speculating about Mom's, and about her relationship not only with her cameras but with the tangible images she could keep.
First Friends: Jiffy & Brownie
With her camera's help, Mom kept captioned albums (at the time called scrap books—two words) from 14 years old through 25, when she switched mostly to color slides. The earliest album has black-and-white (now brown-and-tan) rectangular photos—perhaps taken by a Kodak Jiffy—glued directly to black paper pages which would someday crack, break and crumble. Later albums' square photos, from a Kodak Brownie (see photo above and here) joined the rectangular shots. Both were stuck onto the same kind of black pages with lick-to-stick photo corners. She never seemed to mind handing her camera to someone else so she could have photos of herself participating in occasions, which might make the camera even more of a "partner." In fact, there's evidence of a first-generation (1944) selfie, based on the hint of angle of Mom's arms, the look of trepidation on her friend's face, and how close the camera is—it's doubtful a person would stand that close and there was no zoom lens capability on the era's simpler cameras.
In summer of 1946, Mom and her parents plus an aunt and uncle headed west from Boston in a car. Mom was starting her first teaching job in California in the fall; and Mom's brother, a minister in California whose connections had gotten her that job, was getting married. The trip was preserved in a photo album, not always in geographical order—the first four pages of Niagara Falls are followed by the Finger Lakes—with 6x9 cm photos from the Kodak Jiffy. The trip continued into Ohio, dropped south to follow the Lincoln Highway and old U.S. 40 through Illinois, Iowa, and Nebraska—with a few amazed photo captions like "farm," "cattle," "corn," and "road is straight for miles." Then into Colorado where Mom enjoyed (i.e. photographed) the Rocky Mountains followed by Utah's National Parks, Bryce and Zion, the Grand Canyon, and on into San Diego where Mom didn't yet know she would photograph her five children growing up. Most of her photos from that trip are landscapes, and most, therefore, fairly poor. Probably without realizing how her shots would turn out, she began augmenting her preservation of the trip with original B&W photographs—not postcards—sold in gift shops, starting in Niagara Falls where the souvenir photos were about an inch-and-a-half by one-inch, then the stunning (by a someday-well-known photographer?) shots in the National Parks.
The rectangular format photos of the Jiffy mostly give way to the square of the Brownie after the album shifts from the trip west to Mom's documentation of her fall 1946 activities as a physical education teacher at a private boarding school. And yet it's the Brownie around her neck before that in a college photo, and the formats remain mixed—with a preference for the Brownie—through 1951. Photos from both cameras, taken by Mom, also show up in her mother's photo albums where Nana saved all the photos sent by her children. Mom might see her mother every two or three years; long distance telephone was expensive. Probably every letter Mom wrote to her mother and sister was accompanied by photos to illustrate her description of places, events, and children growing up. To have seen the same thing is part of a closer bond.
In 1971, before we embarked on a six-week trip across the country in a camper, Mom gave the Jiffy to one of my sisters. To me she gave her father's InstaFlex, the kind where you hold the camera at your waist and look down into a series of mirrors. To my brother, a box camera, possibly a Brownie, but it looks bigger than the one she had. And to my eldest sister, a brand new Instamatic.
When Partners Fail
On that 1971 Interstate expedition, even though each of us had our own camera, Mom and Dad took slides that became the family record. But apparently there was some malfunction or film-loading disaster. From a week spent in North Carolina there are forty-two slides, followed by fifty-five slides of Williamsburg and Washington DC. But then in Boston/Cape Cod—where we visited Mom's parents' and family, and the places she grew up—there are all of ten slides. Even worse, one of the pinnacles of the trip was Southport, Maine where Mom's grandfather and great-grandfather had been the lightkeepers at Hendrick's Head. Over several days we rowed dories, did graveyard rubbings, treasure-hunted at extreme low tides, and visited the lighthouse. There are seven slides from Maine. What could have happened? The most likely answer: Sometimes 35mm film didn't engage in the camera's sprockets when loaded, so it wouldn't advance when wound after each shot. Mom could spend a week taking pictures, wondering why she wasn't getting to the end of the roll, only to discover the roll had never started.
Not a coincidence, then, that only months after that trip, for Christmas 1971, Dad bought Mom a new Minolta rangefinder—she could still choose aperture and speed, still had to focus, but it did not allow for changing lenses. For 10 more years she still mostly took slides, but for the first time she could take slides indoors.
Autofocus compact cameras were introduced in 1977. These had mechanized zoom lenses, auto exposure and focus. Mom returned to print film and left slides completely in 1982. She had a series of cameras that could provide clear (or clear enough) action-stopping freeze frames of about twenty years of retirement—holidays, family events, gardens, and mostly trips and cruises—leading to approximately 40+ magnetic self-stick photo albums. Some of those cameras were broken, some used their batteries too quickly, one was stolen out of the camper, one sank in the Mediterranean.
In 1993, Mom and Dad went on a cruise in the Mediterranean. Not a banquet-eating, ballroom-dancing cruise; it was an Elderhostel trip. Now known as Road Scholars, these are educational tours planned around topics from nature to earth sciences to history to art or literature, including some classroom lectures, plus hands-on activities and on-site expeditions. On this excursion, the topic was ancient Greek myth and literature. A cruise among the Greek Islands was part of the course. Passengers included twenty Americans and nine crew members on a 32-meter wooden vessel named "Zeus V."
One morning, a lecture on the Greek deities was interrupted by an odor of smoke and an instruction to go immediately to the sun deck. There crew members issued life jackets and assisted the Americans in putting them on. The engines were dead. The absence of the constant churn produced a new sort of stillness that magnified the slap of water against the hull, clarified the crisp Greek dialogue exchanged between the busy crew, then called attention to the drone of a car ferry, the Apollo Express, approaching the bow.
The car ferry, which had been on its usual route between islands when it spotted the smoke, had veered from its course and was already drawn up alongside the Zeus V. With a Greek crew member on each side, the Americans, outfitted in bulky lifejackets, were assisted in making the leap from their cruise vessel to the ferry's deck.
Most of the crew stayed behind on the Zeus V, attempting to save the vessel, but the Zeus V continued to smolder. Twinkles of flame flickered in the smoke, the flames grew, remained visible longer, finally stood upright and lashed in the wind. Fishing vessels now drew up alongside the burning boat to take on the remainder of the Zeus V crew. Shortly afterwards the cruise vessel burned itself out as it sank into the Mediterranean.
Without any of their personal possessions, the Americans were carried to a mainland port on the car ferry, a trip that took until 8 p.m. Unanimously they voted to continue their tour of Greek antiquity on the mainland, and they did so, after a day spent shopping to replace clothes and toiletries, faxing doctors in the States to replace medications and corrective lenses, and (for my mother) searching for postcards or gift books that carried the sights and scenes that were still on the film in her camera that now lay somewhere under the Mediterranean. As she had watched the cruise vessel burn and sink, she probably exclaimed, "Oh, honey, I forgot my camera."
Instead of photos of the fire, she kept the Greek newspaper articles.*
True Soulmate: The Leica
Despite whatever film-loading failure occurred in Boston and Maine, Mom's deepest, most complex camera relationship was with that 1945 Leica II Dad brought home from Nuremberg. Almost as soon as she met Dad—when he began teaching at the private academy in 1949—the number of B&W square Brownie snapshots ebbed, and Mom began taking color slides. He didn't have a letterman sweater or class ring to give her; he shared his camera. They were married a little over a year after meeting, and the Leica was part of the new family, recording their honeymoon, then the arrival and growth of five children.
The Brownie wasn't completely retired. I don't recall a family album of square B&W snapshots (there may have been one) but many B&W photos taken by Mom after starting her family were returned to her when my two grandmothers died and their photo albums distributed. So perhaps the Brownie was used to create photos Mom could mail and the recipient could see without a projector and screen. In the early 50s, slides were a method to take color photos without worrying about the much higher expense of color film, processing and printing.
Although it cost an expensive $200 in 1945 occupied Germany, the Leica was also a hybrid rangefinder—it could change lenses, but focusing and framing was not done through the lens. For that there was a viewfinder attachment that made the view look like what the zoom lens was seeing, only much smaller and hard to see. Choosing the correct aperture and speed were also difficult. Mom and the Leica constantly battled over exposure. Mom's slides could be dark to the point of silhouettes or washed to the point of ghosts, especially in difficult landscapes like the beach or snow.
Focusing was another concept Mom and the Leica wrestled with. The focus ring was small, the view-finder tiny. And then there were those film sprockets. The Leica couldn't remind her to advance the film after taking a shot, and had no lock to prevent her from advancing the film twice. Long before the calamity in New England, film-advancement disputes with the Leica resulted in blank film or double exposures or something completely unexplainable.
And sometimes the Leica and Mom partnered for something exceptional.
The progeny produced by Mom and the Leica needed to be named and cared for. Perhaps she thought a metal "Kodaslide" storage system—manufactured in Rochester NY where Kodak was located—would work. But after the first one, the same year as her wedding, she switched to the AireQuipt magazine slide storage and projector attachment system. After going through a box of new slides (to cull the unredeemable duds), the slides would be labeled and loaded into a magazine.
In the naming, the slides carried on an evolving history. This is one reason I couldn't discard them after scanning. For example there was a time three was "the whole family," and the Christmas tree had to be moved outdoors so the Leica could produce the family holiday portrait. Additionally Mom's editorial comments gave the slides personalities—or Mom's personality. The sun was in our eyes, the life jackets were swallowing us; Mom, never a sad sack herself, thought it was funny.
And did she remember when she also wore a white shirt to clean a fish as she took and captioned the photo of my brother after cleaning fish . . . did she know she was creating symmetry, or a camera family tree?
The Leica stayed close to Mom for thirty years of her life, strapped to her body on her honeymoon and on Sierra hikes to 12,000 feet, while shepherding five kids through Washington, D. C. on a scorching day in July and serving as the swim coach at Girl Scout camp. Beaches, mountains, boats, theme parks, zoos, hunting and fishing, flowers and sunsets, the Leica went along. But the Leica was inflexible about its limitations and Mom frustrated by an inability to work within those shortcomings. After the New England betrayal in 1971, the relationship had run its course.
In 2004, Mom cried when she opened her Christmas gift from Dad, a Sony digital camera kit. She may not have been sure why she wept. She was five years past a stroke that had impaired language-processing—a camera was more important to her than ever. Was that it? Or was there any residue of nostalgia for the one she'd loaded, focused, wound, wrangled, and compromised with for thirty years? Of all the things I still have . . . the projector, the magazines, the slides themselves . . . the one thing no longer in her photography cache was the Leica itself.
* Originally appeared in longer form in Indigenous: Growing Up Californian by Cris Mazza (City Lights Books, 2003).