The Frances Rodick Portraits


  • Photographer
    Frank Rodick
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Company/Studios
    Frank Rodick
  • Date of Photograph
    2012
  • Technical Info
    Archival pigment prints

I digitally constructed these images around old photographs of my mother, which I discovered after her death. Each image is 40 H x 32 W inches, 100 x 80 cm. For more information, see the "Deeper Perspective" text attached.

Story

I built these portraits around old photographs of my mother, discovered after her death in 2010. Somebody took those originals in 1942 — the time when, unknown to Frances, her life's darkest star was beginning to burn most fiercely. My mother lived a long time, long enough to see empires rise and fall, long enough to see her family grow modestly, and then — through madness, disease, and rancor — wither. Long enough to lose a sharp and stormy mind, piece by piece but in the end completely.

Frances Rodick was born to a life one degree of separation from a great catastrophe — the murderous disaster called the Holocaust. She gave that horror a home inside her and, through a process more relentless than calculated, ensured the nightmare would live inside me as well.

Our lives showed me that Ibsen was right: sin and mayhem will run through generations, like blood through an artery. And just as quietly.

After my father's death, Frances endured six years of what might carelessly be called life, existing in a splintered body and razed mind. Watching those last years I saw some of death’s work up close. The way it makes seconds stretch into years and years compress into moments. The way it makes doing that one last thing impossible: words never said or taken back, that question never asked, a blessing wished for but never bestowed.

I admired some things about my mother. Her raw intelligence and sense of humour. The way she rejected God and Heaven, fearlessly.

But at her worst, which was more often than I wished, Frances Rodick consorted with her torturing spirits, discharging a jagged pain into a shrunken world.

I started work on these images after she died. I thought the timing was a coincidence, but that's probably wrong. I forget who said that artists should create as if their parents are dead—because parents can be the most insidious and visceral censors of all.

I studied my parents’ documents and papers. Some were old — birth certificates and letters — and some not: wills, do-not-resuscitate orders and death certificates.

Parts of the text on my pictures come from those papers. Other text comes from historical documents such as Nazi records. Other words I wrote myself, searching — I realized later — for a voice that fused my mother’s and mine.

I suppose that’s one way of considering a person’s life, and their death too: as an intersection of a single being, the thrust of history, and the memory of those still living.

Not that I ever had a plan in making these pictures.

Perhaps these pictures are a memoir—of her, of me, of her and me stitched together in that sad and harrowing way we never stopped being. If they are, they’re a hallucinatory memoir because one hazards only a tremulous guess at knowing other people, including oneself and—especially—one’s parents. But if they are hallucinations, maybe they’re the kind Céline talked about: fictions, some shining, some terrible, and finally more real than everyday life itself.

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