World of Childhood

Pictures from childhood speak to us, providing magical portals into a primordial world, a world before memory. Before the digital age, such pictures were collected in photo albums, carefully pressed behind plastic sheets or glued to pages with pointed corners. I remember flipping through the pages at the first bald-headed, then short-haired, brown-eyed girl first on her daddy's shoulders and then in patent leather shoes and woolen cape as she headed off to kindergarten. I did not remember this person per se, but she was me and someone loved this little girl enough to collect the pictures and carefully place them in the book. I stared at them as if staring would turn a key in a lock and I would know this girl. And, even though I know that will not happen, I am drawn to the mystique and magic of the past, a world I live in and do not recall.

So, last weekend I became one of those collectors of photos, gatekeeper to the world of childhood when I met with my sister-in-law to capture autumn shots of my niece, Ellie. Gretchin wanted to recreate one of those childhood photos of herself that her mother has and so we dressed Ellie in fall clothing to keep the chill at bay and placed her in front of the remaining foliage in a Radio Flyer wagon.

I used a UV filter smeared with vaseline to create the hazy halo and I love how it provides that otherworldy feeling. Someday Ellie will look back and study these -- perhaps they will still be on line or stored in some digital file or printed out and tucked away, but whatever the means of storage, she will browse through these images to learn who she was and who the people were who loved her. And, if we are around, we will look back fondly on this day and tell her about the world she came from and the child she was and for a moment we will all linger together in this unreachable, miraculous world.

Music

Ever since I was a little girl nothing could touch me or make me cry more than listening to someone create music. Maybe it's because my favorite memories, the ones I most associate with love and security are of sitting around a campfire with my mom and dad, uncles and aunts, grandparents and family friends listening to them sing. The air would be cold, the campfire hot and I would sit wrapped in sweatshirt and blankets in my parents' arms in lawn chairs and on benches made from boards and stumps, as they sang, "It only takes a spark to get a fire going..."

When I was 15, one of my best friends, Becky, would sit at the piano in our living room and I would feel my eyes fill with tears as she played songs she wrote. Each note seemed full of emotion, passion and drama. Each hand on a keyboard seems as distinct as fingerprints. My friend, Joan, was a concert pianist, who still teaches piano. her answer machine says, "You have reached the Foster residence where pugs and pianos outnumber the people." In the early days, when I first met her, I would sit in her studio on cold winter's nights and listen as she played Debussy and Rachmaninoff. Her hands seemed to touch and leave the keyboard with an extra lilt, the presence of joy.

My brother, John, like my father, plays the piano by ear. John didn't play in front of us until he was older, but once he did I was in awe. I cannot understand how he hears what he does, how he knows where to place his hands to bring what he hears in his head to the keys. When he plays he seems to be lost in the melody as if hearing notes from another world and translating them to this one.

Today, he stopped by the family house with two of his three children, Avery and Tori. John sat down to play the piano and suddenly Avery was beside him playing along. Avery, too, it seems hears music in his head. Sitting there, listening, watching father and son lost in this moment, lost in the music, I felt privy to this other world. And, for a moment I could hear the music, too.

* Please note when listening to this video that the piano is out-of-tune. John would want me to tell you this.

Alien World

Tonight I saw my almost 9-month-old niece Ellie. She is the daughter of my brother, Mark, and his wife, Gretchin. We were meeting at the AT & T store to upgrade our I-phones and she arrived in a purple coat and purple hat that her mother had just crocheted for her.

She stared out at me from among the largest set of eyes I have ever seen. I wish I could tell you the color, but they may not have made up their mind yet. They are still baby eyes and not yet set, but are wide and deep, holding pools of foreign knowledge.

It is easy to look at a child this young and think that like Brad Pitt in Benjamin Button perhaps we age backwards, losing wisdom as we go. As with my pugs, I can't be sure of what goes on beneath the surface, what this child is thinking or trying to say. Mostly she watches and observes, like maybe if she applies enough effort she will be able to record enough details to remember later what she now knows for sure.

I have never met a child, no matter how innocent they appear, that looks like a blank slate. They most certainly have their own way of thinking and communicating. Who tells them what's funny? And, yet they laugh. Who tells them what's frightening? And, yet they cry. We are as foolish to try to explain their thoughts and actions with our emotions than we are to apply them to a dog. Children this young are still their own creatures. If, like a camcorder, they record our actions to learn, than I think we may be overwriting a previous program.

Do children lose a little bit of who they are every day, becoming in chameleon-like fashion more like us? Is our subconscious world of dreams and emotions and our penchant for imagination simply the remains of a world where we all once lived? One we leave, step-by-step, behind us as we learn to talk and walk and mirror our adults?

In many ways it is harder to discern my niece's thoughts than it is my dogs because the mirror is too close. Her likeness makes me jump to too many conclusions. I think I can anticipate her needs, but then she looks and stares and nestles her face into her mother's chest and lifts her head and looks at me from behind impossibly long lashes. I deduce she is playing shy, but is she? She looks too sly, but I do not know. Like Alfie's paw brush of Waffle's face, Ellie is talking in ways I may not understand. But, I love to watch and wonder and stare into those swirling orbs while the portal is still open - before the color sets and this alien world is lost to me.

Beguiling

My niece Tori at Shelburne Orchards last week

Could Eve have been any more beguiling?

Avery and the Dog

The other day at the Shelburne Orchard, a beautiful dog was resting amidst the hay and children playing on a tree swing. Avery came upon him and the two bonded. Here is a slideshow of the encounter. The music is by Avery's Dad, my brother John.

medium.m4v Watch on Posterous

The Negotiator

While I tried to capture my nephew, Avery, in photos the other day, his older brother Raine made it clear that I would not be doing so with him. Ten, going on 16, as his mother says, Raine informed us that we would not be photographing him. I did, however, manage to snap an image or two, none of which do this beautiful boy justice.

Blonde and blue-eyed, Raine, is as smart as he is handsome, which he clearly illustrated while we were apple picking. He is also clearly a good businessman and negotiator. First, he finagled me into offering him $25 to take his photograph for one of my future collages. "I never have any boys in my collages," I complained. "Would you let me take a picture of you in a nice dress shirt and suspenders?"

"Would I get to keep the suspenders?" he asked.

"Yup!"

"Cool, I always wanted suspenders," he announced. "But how much would you pay me?"

"Pay you?"

"Yeah, you'd have to pay me!" he said.

"How much?"

"Twenty-five dollars and I might," he said. "And, I'd get to keep the suspenders!"

This negotiation concluded, I later found myself indebted to Raine again when I lost my sunglasses just before leaving the orchard. Raine and I went back to search for them while my sister-in-law remained in the car with the other two kids. After searching the rows of Gala apples where we had spent the most time, I sent Raine back to the Macs to see if I left them there. A few minutes later his long, jean-clad legs came charging out of the orchard followed by the rest of him; my glasses clenched in his fist. "They were hanging from a tree," he said.

"I owe you," I declared.

A half hour later we were eating pizza when Raine looked across the table. A killer smile slowly spread across his face. "How much do you owe me?"

"What?" I asked, grinning back. I knew where this was headed.

"For your glasses? How much do you owe me for finding your glasses."

"Um, I don't know," I laughed. I watched Raine's smile grow. He has the type of smile that just grows and spreads in Cheshire Cat fashion.

"You said they're prescription. Just think how much more you would have had to spend if I didn't find them," he argued. "Isn't it worth $15 or $20?"

Needless to say, when I returned home last night my wallet was $15 lighter. My nephew Raine may have an innocent face, but he knows how to seal a deal. He is a charmer and I'm not sure any of us are ready for when he is actually 16. Just think how much damage those blue eyes and Cheshire cat grin can do by then. Just imagine who else he will charm.

Boys will Be Boys

It is easy for me to take pictures of my nieces, to enter their little girl worlds and catch a glimpse of the women they will become. It is harder with my nephews. Boys, even the quiet ones, are rarely still. And, their imaginations takes them to places that are foreign to me.
I went apple picking with two of my nephews, Raine and Avery, and my niece Tori this afternoon. My nephew Avery is a middle child and a pretty unique kid. He observes and has a great quiet smile that spreads into an amazing grin across his freckled face when he is amused. I often joke that he is an alien sent from another planet, reporting back to the mother ship, because there seems to be so much going on behind those mischievous blue eyes. But, he is still a boy and this is some of what I heard in the car ride to the orchard.

"I've never gone apple picking," I offered. "What if I find a worm in my apple."

"Pick it out and squish it," Avery offered.

"I can't. I"m scared of worms," I said.

"I'll take it out and stick it in my nose," he said.

Such a gallant offer. We drove a little further up I-89 and I told the kids to look out for the camel that you can sometimes see from the Interstate. I know, a camel in Vermont is an unique thing to see, but it didn't seem to phase my little alien.

"I want to buy a camel and if it is going to die I'll save its poop and keep it," Avery declared.

I wouldn't have thought of that keepsake myself.

At the orchard, my sister-in-law had to stop picking apples and leave Raine and Tori with me so she could take Avery to the port-a-potty. On the way home, he decided to share about the experience with the rest of us. "It was disgusting in there," he said. "There was a giant turd and all these flies and a dead fly on the turd. It was gross," he said with a big toothless smile. "The turd was gigantic and the fly was dead..."

A picture may be worth a thousand words, but it is hard with any picture of a boy to capture the thousand special thoughts that bounce around in their heads. It is a mysterious world that this girl may never quite understand, but I marvel at it.

How to Photograph Victoria Faith

"Let's go take pictures," I say to my four-and-a-half-year old niece, handing her the ballerina-blush tutu I bought her.

She grabs it, shrugging off her school dress and pulling the new one over her bare shoulders and head. Let's go, she says, heading toward the door. "I don't want to wear shoes."

"You don't have to," I tell her.

She is out the door, barefoot. And, I am already snapping away, watching as she skips across the lawn. She leads me across the street to summer's waning flower beds and then back across the road whirling through the grass, falling to the ground.

She is oblivious to the camera as she begins to spin her tale. "I know," she says. "Pretend I am a little girl and I am lost and you are busy working and you forgot to feed me." She pouts, doing her best to look forlorn.

I snap away.

She jumps up and runs out back to the trees. "I am a fairy," she says, as she peeks through the leaves. "I am all alone in the woods. Would you live with me?"

I press the shutter button.

Before I can say anything, she picks up the fluffy pink doll bed I gave her and a stick and runs down the neglected cement path, striking a hobo's pose. "I'm running away," she says.
"Move over there in the light," I tell her, but now the stick has become a cane and she is limping down the path like an old man. She flops on the grass again and stares back at me over her shoulder.
Click. I capture that one.

She's up and running toward the back fence where the pugs are playing in the water that has pooled on the pool cover. She grabs a pine cone off the tree and throws it into their midst. "Let's make Alfie stew," she says.

Go over there by the branches, I direct. She ignores me. "Stand here," she tells me. "That's too far away for my lens," I say. She doesn't hear me.

"Stand here," she orders. "I'll tell you where to stand and when to take a picture."

She sits in the grass and spreads her skirt around her. "Now," she commands. "Okay."

"Again." She actually pauses long enough for three shots and then is up again, moving toward the shed.

"I'm lost and I'm sad," she says. "Pretend you find me sleeping." She curls up on the pink doll bed. I snap the picture.

"Move your hair out of your face," I instruct. She tosses it as she springs up marching toward the house.

"I'm hot now," she announces. "We're done."

And, that is how to photograph Victoria Faith.

See the full gallery on Posterous

Fairies on the Prowl

My niece Tori visited this evening and played with the puppies. All donned their wings and there were fairies on the prowl.

The World of Little Girls

I went to my niece's birthday party this past weekend and was able to snap some shots of the little girls there. I also got some that I will be using in upcoming photo collages.