_{Image from the August 8th photo shoot.}

Heather’s mother-in-law spent some time in front of my camera with her grandchildren. In this post, I have made a series of three of my favorite photos. I finished them in a manner reminiscent of Charles Dodgson’s photos. A hobbyest-photographer living in the mid 1800’s, he made up elaborate stories in order to help children stay still in front of his camera.

Future posts will feature further photos from this sitting.

Bread & Puppet Theater is celebrating it’s 50th anniversary this year. It’s produced by Peter Schumann, who, up until a couple of years ago, still danced around on his 10-foot-stilts. This summer he turned 80. Peter’s wife & partner-in-everything is Elka. She is the grandaughter of Scott Nearing, who stood at the forefront of the back-to-the-land movement.

I went to a Bread & Puppet production in September 2009 & have wanted to go back ever since. My favorite part is the museum: two levels of an old, old barn with thick wide planks and peek-holes on the floor. It is hung with masks and figurines and monsters from the Bread & Puppet Theater production collection of the past 50 years. The puppets range in size from large to giant to magnificently humungous. For me, the feeling of being surrounded by so many heavenly blank stares is otherworldly. I did not attempt to capture it on camera.

I did, however, capture a nice photo of disembodied heads rolling across the Gaza Strip.

(from Fire, Emergency Performance for Gaza)

Read more about Peter Schumann and Bread & Puppet Theater here:

Bread And Puppet’s Peter Schumann: ‘What Will Happen When I’m Not Around?’

Bread and Puppet Theater Founder Peter Schumann on 50 Years of Art and Resistance

‘Peter Schumann: The Shatterer’ at the Queens Museum

Peter Schumann on 50 years of the Bread and Puppet Theater

I was so busy working on my trip to Syracuse that I took very few photos. Mom took some photos of Iris dressing up in silk scarves and looking cross-eyed at a raisin balanced on her nose and doing other stuff that absolutely wonderful grandmothers might do with their grandchildren when, suddenly and for the first time, they are in charge all day for many days in a row. Iris had a great time. She completely wore Mom out.

On my last day there, while I was busy packing, Iris played with the vintage mid-century Fisher Price Family House. The house has everything a house might need. As I walked up and down stairs and in and out of rooms, Iris re-arranged the furniture. I watched a moment as Iris placed and removed one household item after another on the arm of a chair. Then she delicately crawled onto the chair, into the nook of her sleeping grandmother’s body, and played with the toys.

Unfortunately, the doll Mommy and doll Grandma seem to have gone on a dust-bunny hunt together. The household of  a girl, a boy, a baby and two dogs is now headed by a single man.

You know, you can hand a stranger a camera you think is perfectly set up for point & shoot & then you get all the photos back & they’re all crooked out of focus with a ton of motion blur & then it’s like, WTF? And then you know you’re doomed because there’s nothing to do to rescue the photos but distress them even more and more.

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