The Body of Brooklyn

Family Snaps [Includes Image Plates]

...................................................................... FamilySnaps Not having been a drug addict, an alcoholic or a psycho, I don’t need a ghost writer. . . . I began as a dark-room man. —Weegee (Arthur Fellig), An Autobiography first began thinking of family photographs as a genre when I noticed how intolerant I had become of their literary use. More specifically, it seems that twenty-five years ago, more or less, American poets started writing family photograph poems with an alarming frequency. There were a few motifs that recurred constantly: grandmothers on porches, mothers by windows, first communions. What bothered me about these poems was the tone of reverent lyricism, nostalgia for an age of filtered sunlight on hazy days, and the predictability with which the photographs seemed to illuminate complete lives, almost as if the photograph were not merely tremendously portentous, but somehow responsible as well. The impulse was generous: to preserve and commemorate. In doing so, one could find the key to relationships, understand and reveal oneself. But photographs are problematic evidence, cropped experience . Of course, so is memory, but its subjectivity is more obvious. Or it should be. The impulse to poeticize when looking at family snapshots is strong, and strong, too, the resistance to ironize the past when it seems palpable; nostalgia shoots into memory’s bloodstream like liquid Valium . I experience this when I find my father dancing impulsively in front of a car near some army barracks during World War II, with a rolled-up newspaper in his hand; he waves it like a wand. Or is he conducting ? Haydn on the car radio? On the back of the photograph he wrote “Williamsburg’s answer to Fred Astaire,” meaning for the photo to be sent home. I itch to poeticize the moment. But whereas Atget seems to have taken the portraits that most of the photo poems I are based on, my own photographs seem, at times, more like outtakes from Weegee or Arbus, occasionally grotesque, frequently absurd. This is not meant as a lament. Many snaps are so bland, so benign, the poses so familiar that, although they stir the memory, they are not in themselves memorable. I marvel that people are so stiffly uncommitted when photographed, so unconcerned with their presentation of self. Most of us will be seen photographically beyond the memory of anything we do, beyond even our names. I have a shot of my greatgrandfather surrounded by his daughters. It was taken around the turn of the century. His beard is long, his look severe. That is all, more or less, I see in him. I could engage in speculation about his attitude or dress, but that would be based on sociological, historical, or cultural generality. I know his last name, Broslovsky, but neither I nor anyone else living remembers his first name, his occupation, or demeanor. Other than a genetic legacy, he has vanished. What remains is his visage : the stiff deportment affected in photographs of the time, nothing else. Were he aware of that withering knowledge of his limited posterity , would he have acted iconically, to preserve his distinction? Would we? The result would be self-caricature. For all I know he could be doing just that. The representative, the typical, is not necessarily memorable. For much of my childhood I was obese. According to some of the pictures, I was not only fat, but quite a little maniac. There is a rather substantial genre of photographs that show me in various stages of attack : dressed as the devil attacking my Superman brother, as a Green Beret beatifically poised with machete, a Southern sheriff pose: rifle crossed on my chest, the holstered outlaw coolly shooting at the camera . In one shot I am astride my brother, hands high and clenched tight, with a growling smirk of Hun-like victoriousness. It is difficult to lyricize one’s childhood in the face of such alienating, albeit amusing, evidence. I look at these pictures and am confronted with a disjunction of memory: I remember myself as a shy, if precociously sarcastic, child, not at all showy or hammy. But I am forced to remember that these photos were all taken by my mother, the constant other in the pictures. How often we consign the amateur photographer to oblivion, forgetting that these home stills catch us between two audiences, poised between future and present, tense with that duality. If we do not completely remember that the photo has a future, it is because...