NOVA LUNA
in black, their hair covered by dark babushkas. For the photographer, the baby's death was a lucky find, an extra bit of money to supplement the portraits he took of families as he traveled throughout the area. Perhaps he learned of the death from a neighbor or friend of the dead child's parents, who saw his wagon parked on the side of the road and suggested he pay them a call. If it had been 50 years earlier, he might have posed the child as if asleep in its crib, on a daybed, or in its mother's arms. That he shot this portrait at graveside hints to it being from the 1920s or '30s, when the practice of postmortem photography was waning. By then, funeral homes had replaced home viewings and home parlors became "living rooms." In years past, a more wealthy family might create an elaborate shadowbox of dried flowers and hand-colored photographs of the child or tuck a plait of the child's hair into a silver or gold locket along with a small photograph. Mourning jewelry and clothing were common during the Victorian era, when etiquette required widows to mourn for two and a half years, most of those wearing a layer of black mourning crape that was gradually removed as the months passed. The photographer reminds his subjects to be still, but the young boy in the foreground cannot keep from closing his eyes. The sun is too bright, and he blinks. In the back right comer is a woman who resembles my father, which makes me think this photograph belonged to his family. She has his broad face, thick nose, and closeset eyes. Her eyes, the eyes of everyone in the photo, stare at me intently. There is a hardness there. Brows furrowed, mouths thin, dark lines. This is a photograph of edges, of a crossed border. "Look," these eyes say. "Look and know this tearing away from life. Look and see this baby's death." I have no one to ask about the photo. My grandparents, parents, aunts, and uncles, all dead. I will never know the names of this silent family or who they are. They are familiar yet out of reach, like so much of my life. Where I imagine raw grief, author Geoffrey Batchen recognizes something else: the fear of our own mortality. In Forget Me Not: Photography and Remembrance, he writes: As historical artifacts residing in the present, these photographs have ... come to represent ... the specter of an impossible desire: the desire to remember, and to be remembered.... For these photographs remind us that memorialization has little to do with recalling the past; it is always about looking ahead toward that terrible, imagined, vacant future in which we ourselves will have been forgotten.
How to remember my father? He was at work so often and at home so infrequently. When I wake up in the middle of the night I hear his deep cigarette voice, watch his fingers trace the constellations, smell his Sunday morning breakfasts of bacon, scrambled eggs, and rye toast rubbed with garlic. But if you asked me what kind of man he was, I can only recall his funeral Mass at St. Clare's Church and his flashy car with the automatic windows.
Summer- Fall 2009
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