Snap Shot |
Click on image thumbnails to view full screen.
|
Snapshot is an homage to my grandmothers, both of whom recorded family members and other things of interest with snapshots. Both had black leather-like box cameras, worn at the corners. The cameras had little chrome cranks for moving the film forward, and were objects of endless fascination for me. My grandmother Smith took pictures of everything: family, house, pets, and especially her beloved flowers. She would always have my grandfather “pose” beside them to give the viewer an idea of how tall the flowers were. Her albums have lots of pictures of Pap standing beside tall sunflowers, staring at the camera, with a resigned look.
While my grandmother Smith traded up to a more modern Kodak camera in the ‘60’s, my grandmother Pyle continued to use the black box camera. She would look down, hold it steady—“Look up, now, dear,” – and press the button. It seemed such an inexact science, as she would squint into the camera’s opening through her glasses, seemingly wavering in the sun, but the snapshots of babies, families and my sister and me, were clear and crisp, capturing the feeling of the day.
So I’ve made a camera with a beautiful queen in the lens, and put a racehorse in the viewing hole. I’ve used copies of photos from my own collection of formal photos of people with hats; I thought they went well with the camera. I’ve used the Poll Parrot “cricket”– other crickets have appeared before in my work – as the shutter cock.
While my grandmother Smith traded up to a more modern Kodak camera in the ‘60’s, my grandmother Pyle continued to use the black box camera. She would look down, hold it steady—“Look up, now, dear,” – and press the button. It seemed such an inexact science, as she would squint into the camera’s opening through her glasses, seemingly wavering in the sun, but the snapshots of babies, families and my sister and me, were clear and crisp, capturing the feeling of the day.
So I’ve made a camera with a beautiful queen in the lens, and put a racehorse in the viewing hole. I’ve used copies of photos from my own collection of formal photos of people with hats; I thought they went well with the camera. I’ve used the Poll Parrot “cricket”– other crickets have appeared before in my work – as the shutter cock.