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PREFACE

The essays in this book should be seen as a collection of mystery stories. Imagine
finding a trunk in an attic filled with photographs. With each photograph we are
thrown into an investigation. Who are these people? Why was their photograph
taken? What were they thinking? What can they tell us about ourselves? What can
we learn about the photographer and his motivations? Each of these questions can
lead us on a winding, circuitous path. An excursion into the labyrinth of the past
and into the fabric of reality.

ILLUSTRATION #1
MORRIS FAMILY PHOTO

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My own endless questions about the relationship between images and reality, and
in particular, photographic images and reality, began with photographs of my father.
My father died on December 10, 1950. I was almost three years old. He was at a party
with my mother, complained of chest pains, and collapsed. He died within minutes
of a massive heart attack, leaving my mother a widow at the age of thirty-two with
two children (myself and my brother, Noel, who was almost six years older than me)
and an adored housekeeper, Mary Jane Hardman, whom we called “Hardy.” This
picture of my mother, my father, and my older brother was probably taken in 1943,
while my father, who was a doctor, was stationed at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. He was a
captain in the army.
I have absolutely no memory of my father. Other than a few photographs, all I
have is an elaborate lithograph of a skull drawn with the words of the Declaration
of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” It was a prize for excel-
lence from his anatomy professor at the University of Edinburgh. (In the 1930s it was
extremely difficult for a Jew to gain admission to one of the top American medical
schools since there were quotas in place. Hence, my father ended up in Edinburgh.)

ILLUSTRATION #2
SKULL DRAWING

There were also the limited recollections of my father from my mother, my brother,
and other family members. My brother, who I believe was horribly traumatized by
my father’s death, never spoke about him.1 No stories, no anecdotes. Nothing. (Maybe
I was reluctant to ask him, but he never volunteered information.) My mother also
said very little. It was as though there was a secret about my father and I had to fig-
ure out what it was. Although my mother often suggested that I should become a
physician—“like your father,” she would say—I told her that I wanted to become an
artist like her. After all, I knew my mother; I didn’t know him.

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ILLUSTRATION #3
DETAIL OF SKULL DRAWING

For years after my father died, his doctor’s office was still part of the house—
downstairs, in what later became the living room. There were hundreds of medical
books with grotesque pictures of various diseases and deformities. There was his
chair, his pipe, his tobacco jar. But he himself was absent. My mother, on the other
hand, was very much present. She was an exceptional musician, a graduate of Juil-
liard, and an extraordinary sight-reader. I was in my twenties before I realized that
not every mother plays Schumann’s Carnaval or Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy.2
Hardy would often use my father as a warning when I misbehaved. “Your father
would never have tolerated this behavior,” she would tell me. But my father was dead,
so the issue of whether he would or would not have tolerated my behavior seemed
remote, at best academic. At some point, I learned from Hardy that my father often
fought with my brother and that my father called me “the little professor.”
And then there were the photographs of my father. Who was this man in the pho-
tographs? On one hand, the photographs were familiar to me. I grew up with them
around the house. They showed my father and mother together while he was in
the service; my father and mother with Hardy; my brother and my father. I’m not
exactly sure what I thought about them growing up, but I was surprised when, years
later, someone observed that my father had a rather severe, forbidding expression.
In a sense, the photographs both gave me my father and took him away. Pho-
tographs put his image in front of me, but they also acutely reminded me of his
absence. He existed for me primarily in photographs accompanied by sketchy family
stories. There was ample evidence that he had once been in the house with us, but

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nevertheless, he was inherently unknowable to me. Who was he? I have no idea. I
have the photographs, but I can only imagine who he actually was.
There is a further complication. Just after my father’s death, my eyes were operated
on. I had strabismus, a condition in which one of the eyes is misaligned. I was wall-
eyed, like Jean-Paul Sartre. With strabismus there is nothing functionally wrong with
the eye, just with its alignment. Once the eye has been put back into the correct posi-
tion, the brain can then integrate the output of the two eyes into a single stereoscopic
image; that is, it can produce normal vision. In order to promote the development
of the “lazy eye,” a patch is placed over the good eye. This treatment doesn’t always
work, and I reduced whatever chances I had for normal vision, by repeatedly tearing
the patch off. My mother bought me a Philco television as a reward for wearing the eye
patch. I dutifully watched Winky-Dink and You, The Howdy Doody Show, and Captain
Video, but I still refused to wear the patch. It was my fault, and it left me without nor-
mal stereoscopic vision (stereopsis) and limited vision in my left eye.

ILLUSTRATION #4
WINKY-DINK AND YOU

Ironically, the eye surgeon was Ben Esterman, the family ophthalmologist, who
became my stepfather twenty years later. When I was older, my mother told me how
she had come to visit me in the hospital shortly after my operation. Both my eyes
were wrapped in gauze like something out of a film noir story, except I was a small
child. My future stepfather said to my mother, “Don’t say anything. Don’t let him
know you’re here, because if he can’t see you it will be too upsetting.” My wife Julia
calls it a new version of the Oedipus story: my future stepfather blinds me and then
marries my mother. But it all ended happily. My mother married Ben when I was
in my early twenties. They were married close to thirty years, and without both of
them, I could never have become a writer and filmmaker.
If I share anything with Oedipus, it is asking one too many questions. Why do I
see things the way I do? I suppose it must have something to do with my skepticism
about vision. Did this influence the way I look at still photographs or my skeptical
approach to documentary filmmaking? I wish I could pin it down more precisely.
Maybe that’s what I’m trying to do here.

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