Personal History as Art

I have been on vacation the last few weeks, which means that I have not been video-biography blogging. But here I am back.

The bad news is that I came back to a water leak in the kitchen that ruined my entire downstairs floor. I am walking around on cruddy concrete for the next month or so while it all dries out. The good news is that I got to visit a few art galleries while I was gone. And one series of portraits - by an Australian photographer called Ruth Maddison - reminded me of why I love family history video.

The portraits I am talking about are cheerful images of ordinary women (taken beside their front fences by the looks of them) accompanied by short biographical sketches written (I think) in their own hand. The pictures are disarming in their directness and their unashamed display of domesticity. One woman holds a sponge cake and another holds a flower, still wearing her apron.

The first thought I had was what were these grandma pictures even doing in this fancy-schmancy art gallery? Isn't this a palace of "high art"?

(Well, I suppose if you look carefully, you can see that the images have been worked on a bit - the artist used oil paint and there is a kind of Kodachrome look to them recalling, perhaps, the 1950s and 1960s when the subjects were in their prime.)

But as I gazed up at them, thoughts of "fit" fled as I experienced the same frisson I get whenever I am privileged to enter into the special secret which is another person's life. And the excitement was all the greater for the warmth, honesty and lack of artifice that informs the images and accompanies the self-descriptions. Grace Buckley (above), 69, says:

I love housework. I washed two walls last Thursday 'cos I didn't know what to do...

I would've liked five children but we didn't have any.

Molly O'Sullivan (right), 82, tells us that before the Depression:

... I worked in a millinery. In 1932 I went to work at ICI. They made explosives.

From hats and dresses to dynamite. Little facts make up all of our lives just as much as the big ones. Like the grains in a gelatin silver photographic print, the facts of our life are all tiny dots that together constitute our story. And like the photographer, we can select and arrange the grains of our life in whatever narrative we think best defines us and what we have done. So all of personal history is a kind of art.

Another part of the intrigue of Ruth Maddison's portraits is what she and the subjects choose not to reveal. "Negative space" - the area in which there is no color or text - defines good design. It is also a good place to focus in biography. And looking at the portraits, I found myself wondering about the things not mentioned - the people not mentioned. The pictures are from a series called "After Work" which she completed in 1990 and they are part of the collection at the National Gallery of Victoria.

We may not be artists in the strict sense but we are all photographers and we can all play our part as personal historians. The simplicity of these beautiful and powerful images reminds us that everyone of us can help tell the most important stories that we have. The stories of our lives. Family history video.

It's great to be back.