In Search of a Family Portrait (Part II: The story behind my album cover)

I recently recorded a new album called I'm From Here whose title track is about the differences between where you're born, where you're from, and where you call home, and that really, we're from people, not a patch of dirt. I decided that the album cover should use an old faded color photo of my parents on Long Island that hung framed on the wall of my mother's bedroom for as long as I can remember. It looks more like an accidental snap than a portrait. It shows the two of them, elegantly attired, staring enigmatically off to the left, my father's right arm around my mother's waist, his left arm extended out of view of the camera, and with what looks to be the window of a house hovering at a strange angle like a floating apparition behind them. The photo has an almost isinglass-like patina to it, and is set in a beige-yellow mat mounted in a gold-painted frame. Many folks could probably peg it as a photo of an early-30s married New York couple in the Kennedy years, but what I see is that my father looks like a man instead of the 26-year-old kid he was in their wedding pics, and he looks healthy, as the picture was taken before his cancer returned.

Lookin' fly, mom and dad.

For context purposes, I need to summarize the original lengthy post I wrote in September 2020 about how, after my mother's death, and with time on my hands during the COVID isolation, I scanned all of my family's thousand-ish slides, and was stunned to find that not one of them was a picture of my father, mother, sister, and me together, leaving the sole Siegel family portrait being a copy of an expressionless Polaroid snapped by a relative in the driveway of our house in Old Bethpage. But it kind of made sense: My father was a good photographer who was quite adept with his Minolta, so he was usually the one taking the family pics. There are glorious Kodachrome snaps of my sister and me with our grandparents that make you feel you could time-travel by diving into them, and occasional photos of him with my sister and me when he handed the camera to my mother, but there were far fewer photos of him than of the rest of us, and no slides of all four of us. When he passed away in 1968, the photo-taking largely went with him. There is only one photo of the remaining three of us from those years we lived in Amherst, and none from when we were in Lexington. While I wished there was an image more evocative than this accidental stiff Polaroid, I'm glad beyond words that it exists. Plus, the trove of all the other pics that I uncovered of my childhood in Old Bethpage is precious to me, looking through it was and still is addictive as fuck, and that's far more important than the fact that I can't wrap it up with a Hallmark-style family portrait.

The cleaned-up version of the only photo of my family.

Back to the album cover. The graphic artist who was doing the design work asked if I had the original slide of the framed photo. I knew that I'd run across it during the slide-scanning project and, like the graphic artist, assumed it would be better, but when I called up the scanned slide on my laptop, I found that it has a very different feel than the framed pic from my mother's wall. It's not cropped, so you can see my father's outstretched arm looking like he's doing the Futurama "Welcome to the world of tomorrow!" thing (and is he pointing at what they're staring at? I still don't know.), and you can see that the window isn't some ghost-like entity but is part of an actual house, but the perspective is very strange, with my parents standing vertical and the house looking like it's tilted at an angle. And with the better resolution and color, you can see that my mother is dolled-up for whatever the occasion was; her lipstick, pearls, and black evening gloves are all much more visible. Yet, although the slide image is objectively superior to the old print, it doesn't trigger the feels for me that the faded framed photo does.

Clearer, yes, but not as evocative.

So I took the picture and the mat out of its frame, scanned it, and directed the graphic artist to use it as the album cover and to perform only the bare minimum processing necessary. I love the way it came out. It has the intended effect of looking like a cloudy window into my past.

Thank you, Eric King

As the March 1st release date of the album approached, I decided to make a video of the title track that draws from my archive of scanned slides to depict those eleven short years I lived in Old Bethpage (as well as my Amherst and Newton years). Obviously, as part of that, I wanted to use photos of my parents. And having pored over the scanned slides dozens of times, I knew that, unlike the portrait of all four of us, the album's cover photo wasn't the only one.

However, I was quite surprised to find that, aside from their wedding photos (scanned black and white prints with a very formal feel), there was just one other high-quality scanned Kodachrome slide of the two of them together—an early picture of them taken during a pre-wedding visit to Washington DC in 1955, showing that there was apparently just a single time they did the "Hey, could you take a picture of us?" thing. There were photos taken during their honeymoon, but they were of my mother or my father, never both. The enigmatic framed photo was the only one of its kind from the 12 years they were married.

It's trite to say "they look so young," but they look so young.

As I searched in another folder of scanned physical photos, I did find one other one—a damaged black and white pic likely taken shortly before their wedding that was charming in its own scrapbook way but didn't have the depth and resonance of the Kodachrome slides.

They were a cute couple.

When combined with some of the posed wedding photos, it was enough for me to make the video, but even with the "my dad was the photographer and selfies weren't a thing yet" thing, I found the scarcity surprising.

While putting together the video (which I'll release on March 1st along with the album), I needed a few pics of me in Amherst and of Maire Anne's and my time with the kids here in Newton, so I dove into our physical photo repository. Ever since I joined the iPhone-obsessed masses, I've been diligent about unloading photos off my phone and into sensibly-named folders. While much of this is to keep car pics organized to facilitate my automotive writing, it also helps me keep personal pics organized (unlike everything else in my life). The old-school physical photos, though, are in three different places in the house, and tend to suffer from a natural sort of spreading out. You know—you go looking for pics of one of your kids for a birthday email, you pull a bunch of them out and scan them, but they never go back into their original envelope. Or if you're going to a reunion, or if an aged relative passes away, you may pull out pics that span decades. This makes loose photos proliferate. You probably put them together in a box, maybe with an envelope for the fragile old ones.

I discovered one such envelope, and while it didn't have more photos of both of my parents, it contained something unexpected—hardcopies of pictures from some of the scanned Long Island slides. I recalled seeing these over the years in birthday cards or family projects my mother would occasionally send me. I hadn't revisited them because the scanned slides are of much higher quality.

But looking at them now, I realized something: My mother had to have gone through the old slides, likely loading them box by box into the old-school ger-CHUNK-gsh-WHACK projector, in order to have had these hardcopies made.

And then came the big epiphany: That's why the framed photo of her and my dad existed and had been hanging in her bedroom for decades. She found the slide and chose to have the picture made. She knew it was the only photo showing them together as a mature married couple. No wonder it hung there until she passed away. Its faded patina, not-a-portrait quirkiness, and what-are-they-looking-at mystery only add to its appeal.

A few days later, I remembered that a few years ago, as a favor to a dear family friend, I scanned her family's slide archive, freely admitting that my ulterior motive was that it might contain pics of my parents. And it did; I remembered finding several and copying them to a clearly-labeled folder on my laptop. I revisited it. There were four. Two were of a visit the two couples made to the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens when my mother was nine months pregnant with my sister Amy, and no one looks particularly photogenic.

But the one was taken on the beach after my sister was born is a delightfully intimate shot of the new parents. My father's face is turned away, and my mother's is in profile, but she's smiling, and they appear attentive and loving. It's a wonderful photo.

I think both my sister and I still have Jones Beach sand under our nails.

The last photo, taken maybe a year and a half later, isn't of just the two of them, but it has a great vibe all its own. It's part of series of pics taken at a party, showing my smiling parents hanging out with two old friends I recognize, everyone looking relaxed and happy. Further, although I can't be certain of the veracity of the dates, the label on the slide carousel from which it was taken read "12-58 to 3-59." That's six months after I was born. If it's true, I love the fact that they're at a party and maybe Amy and I are with our grandparents. I remember seeing the photo after I'd scanned it, but looking at it now and knowing its rarity—no, its uniqueness—I realize what a gift it is, especially in the context of the shitstorm that dropped on them later with my father's illness. 

A little slice of heaven in 1959.

My mother often commented that she and my dad only had 12 years together. The scarcity of photos is certainly a byproduct of that. But like so many other things, you learn to be grateful for what there is. Seeing my dad, smiling at me through 66 years, sitting next to two of his childhood friends from Brooklyn, my mother relaxed and smiling and smoking a cigarette, makes me smile back at them in a way that a formal portrait never could.

--Rob Siegel