Page 136 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

130 CULTURAL STUDIES

A photograph of Slavick’s sister in her First Communion dress that would eventually bear
the text: ‘In thy womb have no shame’.
Source Family photograph taken by William H.Slavick. Collection of the artist.
But unlike the photographs that are found in the usual family album, Slavick’s
dressed take on images that are almost never found in family pictures.
‘Slavick’s childhood dresses no longer can pretend innoeence. They are
transformed through adult texts and become surreal evidence in the absence of
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the original snapshots that they might have been.’ The dresses function like the
missing pictures in an album, or the tears alongside Hawarden’s photographs.
They manage to picture the unsaid. For example, on the creamy soft bodice of a
beautiful cotton dress—with a full green skirt whose hem holds the extra weight
of a full four inches from being turned up for one of the girls so that it could
dance just above her knees—Slavick has stitched:
MOTHER, YOU PUT COLD VINEGAR CLOTHS ON MY SUNBURNT BODY.

THE CLOTHS WERE STEAMING WITH YOUR BREATH AND I KEPT
BREATHING. I FELL ASLEEP AND DREAMED I LOVED YOU.
It is a family picture: a child’s sunburnt body, maternal care, child sleep, a
child’s profound love for the mother. But it is not an image that many of us could
find in our family album. Pain, nakedness, the unposed, the unconscious, the