Then I Was ... Now I Am ...
When I received the invitation to my 50th high school reunion it took but a nanosecond to be jolted back to the miserable period of my life spent at Weaver High School in Hartford, Connecticut. In that culture, where ‘fitting in’ was the key to popularity, someone like me, more interested in art than academics, never really fit in anywhere. Exiting my depressing reverie, I dug out my old yearbook and for the first time in half a century, looked at the grainy black and white photos of the members of the class of 1963. When I look in the mirror now it's hard to see much resemblance between the graduating senior girl I was then and the senior citizen I am today. My first reaction was, “What do these girls look like today, and how do I look in comparison?”
I had always entertained the fantasy of going back to high school as smart, pretty and popular. Perhaps going back as an artist, in a world that values artists and where standing out is the new fitting in, would be even better. And I could even re-take those yearbook pictures. I wrote to the women in my class asking for permission to take their pictures during the reunion weekend. But I wanted to know more about my classmates than simply what they looked like now. I brought along a list of statements that those who wished could complete anonymously. I hoped that this would allow the women to share their thoughts more freely than in discussion. The fourteen images I have selected represent a cross section of the thirty-four women who participated in the project.
The responses to the prompts that I have incorporated into the work are a synthesis of all the women’s answers. My classmates’ enthusiastic embrace of the project, along with their positive response to me not only as an artist, but as someone interested in knowing more about them brought that old fantasy closer to reality. I found it ironic, indeed a bit worrisome, that the interests and skills that isolated me in high school are now so totally mainstream. While the black and white yearbook photos show us frozen in time - empty vessels waiting for life to fill us up - the new color portraits highlight the emergence of a more complex and expressive beauty; women more fully realized and comfortable in our own skin.
I came to appreciate how intimately my classmates’ words about dignity, loneliness, self-acceptance, joy gained and lost, reflected the passage of time while exposing other aspects of “Then I was… Now I am…” beyond those that the eye can see or that the camera can capture. And I think we all look pretty darn good. I would like to acknowledge and thank the people who encouraged, enabled and supported this project. They include my classmates at Weaver High School, Karen Davis, Meg Birnbaum, and the members of Atelier 19, the Griffin Museum of Photography, my photo assistant and organizer extraordinaire Debbie Sachs, and most of all my husband David who has never quite retired so that I can continue to make art.