Houses or homes you lived or live in can really have an impact on your life and images of old homes can help to bring back images of your childhood. Nicole Lamy shows this through her personal essay and photo journal, "Life in Motion". In the photo journal, Lamy has taken pictures of the twelve houses she used to live in growing up, all that she lived in before the age of thirteen. She has taken various images of the homes that all resemble mediocre photographs put up by real estate agents in newspapers.
In order to decorate these pictures for her article, Nicole used oils and pencils to color only parts of the black and white images of her previous homes. She didn’t intend for it to be artful, but I think that she may just misunderstand the meaning of the word art. As an art history major myself, I have seen plenty of art that may look like it took no talent or time to make, but that really isn’t the case most of the time. The various photographs of these many older style homes pasted into an accordion book really have an aesthetic feel to them. There was a real meaningful effect caused by the color added to few parts in each picture. The color could possibly show how Lamy’s memories of her childhood are fragmented or how some things in her childhood were more important than others. Also, the uncolored parts could be showing memories fading away with the color being the next thing to go. This makes sense if you look at the last image of her mother and brother’s current home, Nicole’s last childhood home, which was colored by her brother completely with everything in color. This method of using the mediums of photography, oil, and pencils to convey such meaning was a very artistic accomplishment in my opinion.
In the essay that accompanies the pictures, Nicole Lamy describes the trip she took with her father to visit her previous homes and memories of her childhood that correspond to the photos. Most of the things that she remembered seemed to be pleasant memories, such as playing in a cardboard box that her father turned into a house by cutting out a door and windows. That stopped after house seven which is the last house she and her parents lived together in. Then all Nicole could remember was memories of things that happened after her parents got divorced. Based on her memories, Lamy did not seem to be too troubled by all the moving her parents did, but just by the divorce of her parents.
When Nicole finally gave the accordion book with the picture of her past homes to her mother as a gift, her mother referred to the houses as all her failures. While Nicole thought of this as a pleasant gift of childhood memories of her and her mother, her mother was just reminded of bad times and failures in life. All in all, this series of photographs and essay depicted how homes of your past can remind you of pleasant and not so pleasant memories and describe your past life.
No comments:
Post a Comment