Picture Palace
“It helped me remember the pictures I never took, or if I did, the ones I never showed anyone.
I feared that the Maude Coffin Pratt Retrospective, scheduled to open in New York in November, would give little idea of the woman I was or the times I had. I was behind the camera, cheating, not in front of it. I hinted to Frank that I wanted to write something and he humored me with “Might be just the ticket—something short and personal for the catalogue—paragraph or so about your life.”
Fuck your ca...talogue, I thought. A life is too messy and random to be summarized so neatly. It gets out of hand, it haunts, it sprawls beyond the periphery of a single picture, casting shadows every which way. I needed a little latitude if I was going to do complete justice to my life, which I felt had been happy on the whole and fairly interesting if not remarkable. The picture palace on the lawn held half the story, but the mind had its own picture palace, much grander, like a mad queen’s extravagance—not the museum show of pictorial fossils—room after room of memory’s live ghosts and events only now detectable and surprising revelations behind each creaking door.MoreLess
I feared that the Maude Coffin Pratt Retrospective, scheduled to open in New York in November, would give little idea of the woman I was or the times I had. I was behind the camera, cheating, not in front of it. I hinted to Frank that I wanted to write something and he humored me with “Might be just the ticket—something short and personal for the catalogue—paragraph or so about your life.”
Fuck your ca...talogue, I thought. A life is too messy and random to be summarized so neatly. It gets out of hand, it haunts, it sprawls beyond the periphery of a single picture, casting shadows every which way. I needed a little latitude if I was going to do complete justice to my life, which I felt had been happy on the whole and fairly interesting if not remarkable. The picture palace on the lawn held half the story, but the mind had its own picture palace, much grander, like a mad queen’s extravagance—not the museum show of pictorial fossils—room after room of memory’s live ghosts and events only now detectable and surprising revelations behind each creaking door.MoreLess
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