| Confronting
a Shoe Box by Ed Ackerman Family history is written by the winners. It is either propaganda or scandal. My family history is no different. The situation of confronting a shoe box of 200 badly faded photographs, ravaged by time, and heat, and light, and water, and oxygen (and all living processes on our planet), is now a common occurrence. Grandfathers and Grandmothers die. While we all have our own current life struggles. Photographs remain from past generations to deal with. |
1) A Box of photographs, with no stories is meaningless.
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Although Genealogy says that every life counts, my conclusion is that family photo albums though drastically important within a family are practically useless to anyone OUTSIDE the family. |
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It was August 1998. I had just been through a horrendous six month custody battle. What began as an illegal kidnapping to rural Quebec ended with the loss of custody of my 3 year old daughter. That is when I confronted the shoe box |
Charitably my mom asked me to help make a book of family photos, “so that the Grandchildren would know who their Grandparents were”. There was a $10,000 budget of inheritance money from my Grandfather. Although there were no negatives and the images were mostly 35 mm paper contact prints, the biggest job was not the scanning or retouching on the computer but was the editing of the pictures and the page design, following my mother’s narration, as she wrote it. Spiral bound photocopies of the 172 page book were handed out to relatives at Christmas 1998. |
| The BOOK structure:
“My mother, (who I can’t say anything bad about) died, and my father, (who I can’t say anything good about) abandoned me.“ |
Family secrets were revealed. Although what we now call physical abuse, was not that unusual for the times (rural southern USA 1930s). It became apparent that my mother was abused by her mother. When my mom was five years old her mother died. The two children, of the family were NOT then raised by their father but in all practical senses were kidnapped by an aunt and uncle to their farm. My grandfather finally got his children back as teenagers. |
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Who cares about petty family secrets, history
and propaganda?
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| The FILM structure:
“Fred Clardy tries to preserve life in a darkroom.” The 1930’s were tough for everyone, not just American farmers in the dust bowl. The 1930’s, after the stock market crash spawned the second world war. It was a rough time for everyone. What happened in those times to individual people was as much a product of the times as of their own personal story. People lived, people died. |
Cinematically,
I worked following Bruce Elder’s advice (film instructor at Ryerson),
to create a piece to follow the film
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In the end what we have is a film about one photograph. A four
minute obsession of the last family outing. My Grandfather
tried to preserve his family in photographs as they disappeared. From beyond
the grave my grandparents are now destined to reunite and relive this one
photographic moment each time the film is played. Is this another
propaganda? Yes. But after September 11th and JFK and after a lot
of things, we all experience some aspect of propaganda and we all experience
some aspect of the self portrait of the editor-in-chief in all documented history. If we participate and acknowledge the process we can get to our own truths. Edited together, family photos become propaganda and a self portrait, but left in a shoe box they are just a pile of photos. |
| Ed Ackerman has just completed a 6 month artist in residency at The Quick Draw Animation Society. | “End of Family” is currently being rendered to 35 mm film in Vancouver at Digital Film Group. An Imax version may happen in Winnipeg. Imax tests |