How do photographic images bolster the experience of memory (real or imagined) and what role does our intention—individually or collectively—play in experiencing (or reinterpreting) those memories?
For my final project in WS-372, I look again at the use of photographs in Cheryl Dunye’s The Watermelon Woman and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. I welcome Dunye’s compelling case that we should create the archives we need. I share with Bechdel a parent/child collision of sexual identities and a fascination with who our parents might have been before us…or indeed, without us. I explore the power of imagery even decades after we’ve forgotten something. And I look at the work of Ken Gonzales-Day who bookends Dunye’s invented archive by reworking an ugly historical record so we might more thoughtfully engage in the experiences of lives sacrificed to a country that stubbornly refuses to contend with its many brutal legacies.
Which image is real?
The Watermelon Woman:
Creating An Archive
In Cheryl Dunye’s film, The Watermelon Woman (1996), budget constraints required the filmmakers to create an archive (rather than license an existing one), fashioning a life, career, and body of work around the fictional “Fae Richards,” the subject of Cheryl’s documentary film-within-the-film. When Dunye’s Cheryl visits an archive within the movie, she flips through both “created” photos and images from “real” Black Hollywood, including Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Juanita Moore among many others. By melding the archival and “archival” images, Dunye’s film is able to convince viewers that what is being documented is “real”. More importantly, Dunye’s film focuses on the lives of Black lesbians for whom documented history is scarce. By inventing an archive for the fictional Fae Richards, Dunye makes clear the importance of recording histories of underrepresented intersectional communities, as in the film’s final epigraph, “Sometimes you have to create your own history.”
Which archive is created?
Fun Home:
Building A Mystery
In her memoir, Fun Home (2006), Alison Bechdel confronts difficult, multi-layered traumas involving the death (potential suicide) of one of her parents and the parallels between her own queer life and that of her closeted father. One method of illustration Bechdel uses includes recreating family photographs, as she does here on page 120. At top is a photo of her father in bathing beauty drag, about which she has no context. Beneath it she draws both a photo of her father in his early 20s and a photograph of herself at a similar age. Her captions note the similarities of affect and appearance and wonder if her father’s photo was taken by a lover as her own was.
Gregg Moore, Claire de Loon and Soleca, The Bohemian Goddess (2005).
The Genealogy of Memory
In 2005, I was struck by a commercial image of Madonna in a campaign for the luxury brand, Versace. At the time, I wasn’t quite sure what I found so compelling in the image: a riff on the fairy tale of Snow White, bite out of a poisoned apple, beautiful woman lying upside down on a flight of stairs, and an impossibly glamorous gown were certainly eye-catching. Still, the photo tugged at me at some more primitive level I couldn’t put my finger on. As I prepared to attend the annual drag festival, Wigstock, in New York City that year, friends and I used the image as inspiration for a comic set of photos of my drag alter ego, Claire de Loon.
Many years later, while sorting through my maternal grandmother’s scrapbooks, I stumbled across a photo of her that made my jaw drop: in 1968, while biking near the C&O Canal outside of Washington, DC, my grandmother was photographed (by either her husband or her daughter) lying upside down on a set of wooden stairs. There was more: I subsequently discovered a photo taken inside Grandma’s house in Bethesda (circa 1969), lying upside down on the stairs next to 3-year-old me! No surviving family members have any real context for grandma’s penchant for lying upside down on flights of stairs, but the photographic record confirms it happened…more than once!
I have no “real memories” of the house in Bethesda; what I know, I know only from photos. Perhaps I’d seen the photo as a child, or perhaps the action of lying upside down on stairs was so odd as to imprint upon me. I know from photos that the Bethesda house is also where I performed early drag, snagging wigs from my grandmother and my aunt. Where my own memory fails to supply the details, the photographs fill in gaps. My lived experience reflects through the image prism differently over time.
Photos As Emotional Triggers
As in Alison Bechdel’s family, my family includes queer parents and queer children and a legacy of lies and evasions that wreaked a fair amount of emotional damage over the years. My mother, married to my father for 16 years, separated from him and went into a phase we later referred to as her “second adolescence” during which she dated both men and women (unfortunately, her second adolescence ran headlong into my first). When Mom moved to another state with her female partner (who was still married to a man) they each moved with their youngest children in tow. What this meant for me, as the oldest of two children, was that I lost my mother and my younger sister the summer before my senior year of high school started.
As a burgeoning gay kid, on the verge of coming out of the closet, I thought I had a natural ally in my obviously lesbian mother; I was mistaken. When I came out to her at 18, I assumed total acceptance (we’re both gay!) and expected unconditional love (you’re my Mom!) I wasn’t remotely prepared for her internalized homophobia (she and her partner weren’t out) or for her fear as a public health nurse with a gay son at the height of AIDS hysteria in the U.S. Things between us got only more complicated as I attempted to welcome my obviously lesbian younger sister into the gay community: those efforts were met with anger from my living-and-working-with-her-lady-life-partner mother who lived closeted in rural Montana. Mom’s mom, my beloved grandmother, was nobody’s ally and simply refused to discuss the reality of our emotional lives. And so we all fell into lockstep and spoke hardly at all about matters of love and life.
Like Bechdel, my considerations of family history are convoluted and full of what-ifs and a need to fill in the gaps in some way. “Now We Are 58,” says the A. A. Milne title in my head, and now I do forgive and hold compassion for so many choices my mother made at the time, decisions that I simply failed to understand (and which she failed to communicate in any reasonable way). I know I was the light of my mom’s life when I was born, when she was 23 years old, and I think the photographic record shows how mutually we felt that love. As the lucky recipient of that intense mother’s love in my young life, I now understand that the version of my mother I imprinted on and adored (always, despite our many complications) was not the adult woman she’d grow up to be.
I’m also fully cognizant that at 23, Mom was nowhere near finishing her own development. As a young woman raised in Decatur, Georgia during the 1950s, in a comphet society, my mother became what she knew—at least initially. At 23, Mom couldn’t yet even fully envision who or what she’d ultimately want from her life. As the object of my Mom’s love, I can also now acknowledge the joy she felt in the presence of her beloved partner…I recognize it in photos of their early days in Montana (as above with her red roto-tiller). And I know that despite our troubles we more or less made our way back to each other long before she died too young at 75 in 2019. Yet in the same ways Bechdel reassesses and reconsiders (and revises?) her family histories…I do that, too.
The photographic record is a blessing—and a curse—and a shortcut to all manner of emotional cues.
Historic Revisionism:
Ken Gonzales-Day’s
Erased Lynchings, 2006
Lynching postcards—a warped, racist American tradition dating to the late 19th and early 20th centuries—featured a central gruesome image of a lynched human being (most often African American) surrounded by the community that killed them. Notoriously, these macabre images frequently feature giddy, smiling, often well-dressed white people (sometimes including children) celebrating publicly the death of the murdered persons. These postcards were printed to commemorate these acts of violence and were mailed or exchanged by everyday Americans (the U.S. Post Office did not ban them until 1908, after which they continued to be mailed within plain envelopes).
Interdisciplinary artist Ken Gonzales-Day researched the “history of lynching in the American West” (with a focus on Latinx and indigenous communities in California). Gonzales-Day then digitally manipulated several lynching postcards to “erase the victim’s bodies,” refocusing the images on the crowds of white murderers and the communities celebrating these heinous acts while restoring the dignity of the victims by literally “erasing” their disfigured bodies from the images. Gonzales-Day writes of two intentions in the work: “One as a way [to] resist the re-victimization of those killed, and the second to draw attention to the crowd and the social conditions which made such acts possible in the first place.”
Erased Lynchings provides a compelling alternate version of “history” by forcing viewers to shift their focus away from the images of mangled bodies and on to the leering communities celebrating these American traditions. The resulting change of perspective offers a wholly different experience of the images and turns their intended purposes on their heads, to powerful effect. As viewers of the original images, we would likely cringe and shirk from our duty to bear witness. In Gonzales-Day’s versions, we know beforehand that the images have been manipulated to remove murdered bodies, so we now look American evil square in the face and must contend with the banal, ordinary horror of our own nation’s legacies.
