I created these photos from old photographs as well as images from around my house and neighborhood that I believe to represent my mother in many different ways. From her obsession to blue and white glass vases, French posters, and modern art, these edits show just a few things that make me think of my mother. And by combing by my 10 images into 5, I attempted to make old photographs just a little more meaningful and interesting.
My “winter garden photograph” is a young photo of my maternal grandfather. If I had to guess, I would say he was either in his late twenties or early thirties. It is a portrait photo of him sitting up straight in a suit, with his lips slightly curved up. Personally, I did not know my grandfather very well. He knew me as a baby, but I didn’t see him again until I was 12 years old on a family trip to Nigeria, and, sadly, he died a year later. Before meeting him, my mom would tell me stories of him, and she always remembered him fondly. She used to describe her father as a disciplinarian; he was very strict and wouldn’t take any bs from his children. He was highly educated, hard-working, and successful, which was a feat, in and of itself, because he came from a poor background. He had a bank job and owned his own poultry farming business. Bank jobs in Nigeria hold the prestige as being a doctor or a lawyer in the U.S. He would travel abroad to different places in Europe for business, which was extremely uncommon, even for people to do in Nigeria today. I asked my mom once that if he was able to travel abroad, then why didn’t he ever come to the U.S.? She said that he didn’t agree with the ways the U.S. did things and would never go. He held himself to a pretty high standard, one could even say he was a little cocky based on the way my mother and grandmother have described him to me, and I feel like that is radiated in the photo.
The photo I have is actually a photo of the original photo that I took on my trip to Nigeria. I completely forgot I had it until I went through all my family photos. To a regular person, they would see just a black man, maybe think he is a respected black man because of his clothing and the way he is sitting. However, I see a black man who was able to beat the odds, especially during a time when the consensus was that African people were less than. He did business with white people and was respected by them.
I am delighted I was at least able to meet him. I met him when he was much older (in his 80’s), so “winter garden photograph” of him isn’t what I saw in 2012, but I see some resemblances between him in the photo and what he looked like when he died. Even in death, he is respected and remembered fondly by his family community.
As I looked through old family photos, I noticed common themes of change, togetherness, growing up, and most importantly, happiness. My family (including myself) basically hoards physical photographs that desperately need to be organized into albums instead of sitting in a dusty chest disguised as a coffee table in the middle of the living room or lining the walls of my room. I enjoy looking at family photos as my parents’ transition from taking at least 50,000 pictures of their first child, my brother, at every angle and slowly begin to spend less time behind the camera once I, the last child of four, am born. My three siblings and parents all have very distinct personalities that are often represented in family photographs however, it was difficult to pinpoint one image that really exhibited the true essence of just one. However, as I compared baby photos from the early 90s to early 2000s, I noticed a trend in the spirit and emotion of one family member, my grandfather.
My mother’s parents live an hour away from my home in Omaha, Nebraska and thus have been extremely prevalent in my entire life. My traditions, sense of humor, personal values, and graciousness come directly from my grandparents. In each photo of my grandfather, whether it was a photo from a family vacation, the hospital the day I was born, or one of the many times my grandparents babysat us as my parents escaped their four crazy children, my grandfather is always smiling. However, after looking through this chest and failing to find a photograph that captured the true essence of my grandfather, I remembered a photo that I hung on a wall in my room several years earlier.
This photo (mostly likely taken after a few glasses of fireball) was found a couple of years ago along with a series of very similar pictures of my grandparent’s friends smiling just as hard and just as close to the camera. This photo not only captures the essence of my grandfather’s sense of humor, social personality, and obsession with sweater vests, but illustrates my personal forever image of my grandfather. From growing up very poor in the small farming town of Leshara, Nebraska to now, happily retired with my grandmother and able to support nine grandchildren from three daughters of his own, my grandfather will forever be represented by the happiness of this photo. Even though I was not present when this photograph was taken, the constant jokes followed by contagious laughter and the raw spirit of my grandfather at every family gathering is never something I take for granted, especially during times like these when seeing loved ones is more difficult than ever before.
My family doesn’t usually look at photographs and albums very often. I think since the majority of my family is still back in El Salvador, they rely heavily on social media like Facebook to connect with the rest of the family that is in the United States. A lot of pictures get posted there and that is what we usually talk about. It was rare for my mom and me to go through the pictures especially, pictures of herself. She grew up in the more rural parts of El Salvador and she doesn’t have any pictures of herself then but through stories, I feel like I can imagine what she looked like especially when I have a lot of her features. I think having her by my side during this process helped me find my “winter garden photograph.”
My mom appears to be a serious woman when someone glances at her but in reality, she is a social butterfly that is constantly smiling during conversation. Photographs are able to capture her essence within her smile and her mannerisms that make her who she is. Most of the photos are from her being the U.S. for the first time and so she appears differently, I wasn’t able to meet that version of my mother, the one who came to a new country and sought a better life for herself. My mother is brave and she worked for what she has and she made a lot of things grow, that is who she is. She nurtures those around her despite coming from a background in which she had significantly less than others.
My mother told me the story of how she met my father while we were looking at photos of her since a couple of pictures of my dad came up. He also came from El Salvador when he was young with his brother and from those photos, you can tell he was one of those “cool” guys with the way he posed in his pictures. She told me how she would walk by him on the stairs of the apartment building they both lived in on her way to work and that he would always try to talk to her. She gave in one day and spoke to him and he asked her out to the movies. They both watched Titanic but the thing with my mother is that even now she struggles to understand English and so I asked her if she understood the movie and she said no. I proceeded to explain Titanic to her. If there is something that explains the kind of person my mother is, it is that story.
It was pouring outside, my mom brought out the boxes and albums of photos. I honestly do not remember the last time I looked at family photos. My mom grew up in Iran and the photos depicted a different time. The albums had photos of the first time my grandparents met, to when my mom was about 5. There were a good amount of people that I didn’t know, so I was curious about who they were. My mom told me about the people I didn’t recognize and even some funny stories about them.
We got to the last page of the only photo album left and the last photo was of a woman in her twenties standing next to a man. This woman looks strong and proud. She wears her outfit confidently. It is of my grandmother. She is energetic, outgoing, and the quality I admire most is that she follows her heart. She makes every decision confidently. Another photo caught my eye, it was of my grandmother holding my mother.
She is loving and pours her heart in everything she does. My mom has inherited all of those great qualities. She is one of the toughest women I know. I have always admired her. It made me think about the things that get passed down not necessarily objects, but memories, characteristics, and life lessons.
I don’t have access to our family photo albums right now, so I started off looking through the pictures I have saved on my iPhone for my winter garden photograph. Most of the photos I had in my phone of family members were pretty mundane, however, so I talked to my mom (the photo keeper of the family) about what old photos she might have on her computer. I looked through the photos she had on her laptop but still didn’t see anything that really caught my attention. As I was struggling to find a photo to choose, my Mom then remembered she had a few print photos from her childhood with her. I took a look at them and one of the photos in particular stood out.
It was a photo I’d never seen before of my mom in her late teens making a wacky pose on the beach in New York. This photo captured a part of my mom that I love, and it was pretty crazy to see it on display 20 years before I even existed. To me the photo captures something that I’ve always admired about my mom, that she’s not really concerned with what other people think of her.
This trait of hers often comes out through her extroverted and goofy nature. Whether its singing or dancing throughout the house, she’s never afraid of making a fool of herself in the process of having fun. This has always been one of my favorite things about my mom and seeing her display this wacky, fun-loving side of hers in a photo from the 1970s was really cool to see.
It’s around 10 pm and my mother, father, sister, and I gather around the dinner table with four shoeboxes filled with old photographs. I rummage through one box as I come across pictures of my mom and dad when they were dating in the ’90s. My parents first started dating when my mom was 14 and my dad 16. I asked them questions about the clothes they were wearing, where they hung out. I began looking at more photos to find images of my older sister before I was born. We laughed and it was a great bonding experience for us. It had been a long and hard week so to share laughs over photos was as if a weight was being lifted.
Suddenly, I came around to my own photographs. I saw my first pictures, newborn baby, in awe of the world, but evident of the sass and spunk I was destined to obtain. My parents reminded me that as a baby I had such a vibrant personality and I was extremely stubborn.Then I came across this picture, it shows my mother and me at my first birthday party… obviously blues clues themed. My mom tells me stories about my first birthday and how I was scared of blues clues and cried the entire time and refused to walk even though I basically knew how.
Looking at this photograph I see the protective yet supportive side of my mother and for me, that is her essence. Since before I was brought into this world, my mother has done everything in her power to protect me and keep me safe. She has also supported all of my dreams even when I wasn’t sure of them myself. This is shown in the way she holds me as she crouches down to get close to me assuring me that she will always be there. In her hands as well as with one hand she holds me tightly with a grip that is protective and forceful, and in the other, she uplifts me and holds me up. My mom has a great balance even now of supporting me in my endeavors, but also giving me the insight that I need to ultimately protect and help me. It isn’t as assertive as this picture where she holds me to prevent me from falling on my face, but she lets me know that she will always protect and support me no matter how old I get.
I cannot remember a time when there were not stacks of photos, albums, bins, and scrapbooks out in the house somewhere that my mother was in the process of going through. For many years there was a goal of “finishing the scrapbooks,” an unachievable target, which my sister and I, in our youth, worked toward as we filled the pages with brightly colored paper that garishly and over-decorated with stickers and cut-outs. The photographs were not our focus at the time. Today, my mother sits on the couch with me and shows me photos that she is sorting through, picking the ones to keep, the ones to send, and the ones to shred (my mother once told me to shred any photos I was throwing out in order to avoid becoming an art students project á la found art). I like looking through these family photos with my family. There is something that makes me feel connected when I learn the names and faces of my lineage, when I see photos of my parents before they were married, and when the power of genetics becomes so apparent as I see the baby photos of aunts and see the same face in children’s baby photos. But it has always been a collective activity.
Very rarely in my life have I sat down alone and looked through family photos. My mother or parents has always been my side, or sometimes even a slew of cousins, aunts, and uncles as we crowd on my grandparent’s couch to flip through scrapbooks. So, as I sat on my bed tonight, with a scrapbook and four boxes of photos to look through, I didn’t think I would it would feel different to look at them alone. I was wrong. Of course, I sat down with an objective, to find my own “Winter Garden Photograph,” which shifted my experience, but even with this searching mentality, I think that being alone while I looked was the most essential aspect of finding the photo. Instead of pointing out in features, deciphering the location or time, exclaiming at outfits and hairstyles aloud with others, as I looked at the photos I perceived and processed them internally. I held them only in my hands to see, not with arm extended or shifted away, to share with others. It was an intimate experience in which what I looked for in the photo was the essence that I understood of that person.
I didn’t come into the process knowing that I was going to look for a photo of my father. But as I continued to look at photos, I kept feeling myself looking at or for him in the image. Perhaps this is the result of stumbling across a truly iconic photo of my father, and from then wanting to just look for more, but I don’t think that is the only reason. There is something about my father that makes his true essence hard to capture. I have seen pieces here and there in other photos, but it’s hard to photo that I think really allows for me to feel the essence of his being. My “Winter Garden Photograph” did not immediately stand out to me. It is a photo of my father, standing in a place that I do not exactly know. I looked at it for a while, noticing my father’s posture, his clothing, his body language, but I kept moving. I realized as I had moved onto another box, that I was still thinking about that photo, one that was far less iconic from other photos, including one of my father standing in front of Half-Dome with his acid wash jeans and 80s ‘stache. And that didn’t exactly make sense to me, but thinking of Barthes, and what he writes about the photos that we still see or think about when our eyes are closed, made me realize that there was something in that photo, something that was drawing me in. What was pulling me back to the photo, I realized as I looked at it again, was that it contained in it an image of my father that embodied who he is. He is still, pensive, patient, serious, but playful. He is curious, intelligent, stubborn. He is himself, my father, but also not. He is the essence of himself in this photo.