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"Coming of age at the turn of the Century..." Artist’s Statement These photographs reflect the memories, dreams and reflections of my own life and those of my family, as well as the countenance of the subjects who have stood before my camera over the last fifteen years. For me, the most interesting photographs are those that reflect a collaboration between photographer and model, and which result in a psychological collage that reflects the experience of both the subject and the photographer. I suspect this mixture is true of much artistic expression, although it has become increasingly overt in my own photographic imagination over time. These past and present beings, photographer and model, meet in this portfolio. The subconscious is a boundless well of inspiration but its mysteries are often well hidden by our preoccupation with the “real” world that relentlessly intrudes upon us. In these images, seeds of my past experience, the mythology of my family, and our collective dreams and memories take hold and thrive. I grew up with a strong sense that the ghosts of past experience share space with our current lives. As a child, my mother often told me of her early life in New Hampshire during the Depression. The imagery of her stories was strong. Her family were tenant farmers, moving every year as my grandfather burned some new bridge or other within a few months of his arrival on a new job. As a young girl, my mother had witnessed her father being kicked in the head by horse – an injury from which he died many months later. Their lives remained hard and their surroundings austere throughout her childhood. Only the Second World War broke the pattern for the four siblings who survived into the 1940's. The images of my mother's early life and girlhood were planted in my mind when I was very young. The texture of those visions has found expression in some of these photographs, fifty years later. As an only child, I had little other close exposure to the evolution from girl to woman after age six, and thus I pictured it, however incompletely, through the lens of my mother's stories. Hers was the world captured by Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird), Carson McCullers (The Heart is a Lonely Hunter), and the stories of Flannery O'Connor, although my mother's characters lived harder and leaner than did the characters of that fiction. My own experience growing up in Montclair, New Jersey in mid-century also left a strong visual impression upon me. When I recently found a box of photographs taken of me at age five, I was intrigued to find within them many of the themes and textures that came to dominate my photography many years later. At the age of 18 months, my family began visting Martha's Vineyard, staying in a very small and humble cottage set in the marsh grass adjacent to the salt ponds that form behind the dunes. I was first brought to St. Agnes Episcopal Church in my preadolescence by my then partner in crime, Ian Murphy. The priests I came to know at St. Agnes and elsewhere were kind men whom I still revere. But the passions that were stirred within that Church (which were not always those intended by my elders) have long outlived the articles of my early faith. All of these places, events and stories left strong images imprinted upon my imagination.
"…the experiences and illuminations of childhood and early youth become in later life the types, standards and patterns of all subsequent knowledge and experience, or as it were, the categories according to which all later things are classified—not always consciously, however. And so it is that in our childhood years the foundation is laid of our later view of the world, and there with as well of its superficiality or depth: it will be in later years unfolded and fulfilled, not essentially changed." Arthur Schopenhauer
Me (space suit) 1955, Monclair NJ The photographs in this series were taken in coastal Maine and Massachusetts, Italy, Russia, France, and the Dominican Republic. Several were taken on islands in Casco Bay, Maine, near my home.
Jack Montgomery December 2009 |
