A Personal Memory of Photography: I was in my early 20s & spending time with my Great-Grandmother. At the time, her memory was fading away, elderly aging & dementia. I remember sitting on her loveseat inside of her bedroom & reading the Baltimore Sun. When I got around to the Art & Society section, there was a huge cover story titled, The Main Street of Jazz---Where Jazz Still Echoes. This cover story was a write up on Baltimores Jazz days in the 1950s. Pennsylvania Avenue in West Baltimore had a collection of jazz clubs & bars, just like Harlem & Chicago. Black culture on the Arts side. Even though I am an avid reader, I immediately started to study the cover photographs. I looked up at my Great-Grandmother who was just lying in her bed looking up at the ceiling. Out of instinct, I walked over to her, took a seat on her bed & I said, Grandma, do you recognize any of these people? She looked, grabbed my wrist & pulled my arm which was holding the newspaper closer to her face & responded, Cab Calloway, which was accurate. She pauses---I look into her eyes. They are scanning the photographs in the newspapers article & she says, Billie Holiday, (it was actually Sarah Vaughn, but I was not about to discourage her by correcting her---maybe she had a memory about Billie Holiday & it came thru when she observed a photograph of Sarah.) Lastly she looked at a photograph in the newspaper spread & said, Louis Armstrong, which was another correct photo i.d. call. Now she is holding the newspaper in her hands & telling me about the Royal Theater, Ubangi Club, Club Casino, & how she watched these jazz musicians & jazz singers perform; meanwhile, I am hoping that she does not go too deep into her memory & start telling me about some rendezvous that I did not need to know about, (if so, I was going to quickly use the Grandchild does not need to hear this from their Grandparent clause), & she did not go there, so my ears were safe. However, the stories that she shared with me about the jazz music & the cultural energy during a time when I was nowhere even near my physical existence---I am a believer that Photography is the reason why I met this kind of destiny which evolved into a recollection about my Great-Grandmother :-) Thank you for reading, Shaun/Arts.
Posted on: Mon, 28 Jul 2014 14:42:26 +0000