Page 137 - Cultural Studies Volume 11

COLLECTING LOSS 131

‘… Slavick told her mother that she wanted to use the worn and mended dresses in an
artwork—she wanted to embroider her own text onto them.’
Source Elin O’Hara Slavick, from A Wall of Incoherent Dresses, 1991. Collection of the
artist.
smells of the home, the breath of the mother, the unmasked, a grown child’s
sleep, the everyday, a sensual confession—such steam and chill are rarely there.
Like most of us, Reynolds Price can only find ‘innocent’ and ‘posed’ pictures
in his family’s shoe boxes, albums and drawers. As he writes in the afterword to
Sally Mann’s Immediate Family,

[My parents] exposed yards of film, not only in their frank satisfaction in a
child but also in pursuit of visible proof that I was glad to be their product,
a moon to their sun—and I generally was—but they likewise early enlisted
my cooperation in a long concealment or denial that my becoming moon
had hid a dark face, which was where I lived for far more hours—and now
for nearly six decades—than any of them would have wanted to hear, not
to mention confirm in permanent image. Like most veterans of family