Documentos de Académico
Documentos de Profesional
Documentos de Cultura
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
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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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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xxiv
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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xxv