A Nod to My Father
Leo— I couldn’t have done these cards without you.
Your appetite for life was matched only by your desire to share it. You were a renaissance man, finding yourself reborn through reading and records and rose bushes—and later, recollections. (Even at 94, they never left you.) But you always understood that joy wasn’t in consumption, but creation. It was inevitable that a medium so built for the capturing of moments—photography—became a passion.
If I spent my adulthood capturing, I spent my youth being captured—often, by you. I wrangled siblings into frames; forced smiles; cried, and laughed—often, hard. I saw your smile beneath the camera; heard the click of its shutter, peered over your shoulder as you sheared the edges from photographs and placed them in scrapbooks that now fill the shelves of coffee tables, or into composites that blanket our walls. Fifty years later, those collections still beckon to those that pass them by—even to those for whom everyone in them is a perfect stranger.
If there is a question here, perhaps the answer is in the photographs. If there’s anything they teach us, it’s that there are dimensions to moments. Smiles betray as much as they obscure. Photos have meaning not only because of the stories we tell around them, but because of how those stories change over time—whether or not we want them to.
Seeking imagery, tracking light, maximizing dawn and dusk, the rule of 3’s, and the simple power of word play. It’s rooted here. The striking visuals, clever word banter, provocative musings… born of my relationship, steeped in creating, with my dad. He saw several of these cards, the early ones. While my mother missed the underlying sass on ‘grow a pear,’ Leo bought into it, immediately. “Spectacular” he’d roar. ‘In death we gather, in divorce we scatter,’ slowed him in his response. Obviously taking the message to heart and sharing, ‘Jesus, Laura, that’s brilliant,’ adding the inquiry, ‘did you come up with that?’
I’m grateful.
I’m no fool. I wouldn’t be here— nor would the cards be— without him. They have significance because in their brevity, they can mean something different to everyone. But of course, the path to brevity isn’t brief. The picture is the moment; the words are how we want to remember it.
I am honored and delighted to acknowledge this man.