Over the past two years, I have been working on a documentary about my grandmother, Angela Singer. A Southern homemaker and photo hobbyist, Angela has taken over 150,000 strange and wonderful photographs (approximately 12 a day) for the last 30 years.
Before getting her first still camera, Angela relied solely on home movies to document the minutia of her everyday existence –shooting some 79 reels on 8mm and Super-8. I began this blog, in part, to document the process of preserving those home movies and transferring them to digital video. That preservation project blossomed into a full fledged documentary and the monumental task of documenting and preserving my grandmother’s entire photo collection.
Angela can and does take pictures of everything she encounters in her day-to-day, from checks she receives in the mail to the five o’clock news broadcast on her living room TV. As she told me on camera in one of our many interviews, “My camera never leaves my side. I even take it with me to the mailbox.”
It’s amazing to me that I went years without thinking my grandmother was doing anything out of the ordinary. For me and for my family, her picture-taking has just been an accepted fact–something that we’re so used to that we hardly even notice it at all.
Nevertheless, after I began making films of my own I rediscovered my grandmother’s photo obsession and saw how extraordinary her practice of photography really is. This process of unwrapping my grandmother’s photo hobby and unraveling her dual identity as Southern grandma and outsider artist has allowed me to more fully discover myself: why I make films, why I feel such a compulsion to preserve what I feel is important. My documentary is, in many ways, an essay about this discovery and finding myself in the reflection of my grandmother’s lens.
To serve both the documentary and my goal of preserving my grandmother’s collection, each time I’ve made the trek home to Joelton, Tennessee, during the past few years, I’ve brought home plastic bins of photos, albums, and VHS-C video tapes. Since those first few trips, I have managed to scan and digitize some 30,000 photographs of my grandmother’s ever-growing collection. Of those, I’ve sorted 1,500 that I found striking, moving, or just plain weird:
Sorting and sifting Angela’s images has almost become an obsession in and of itself. The more I look at her photos, the more I want them to be seen–not just by me, but by anyone curious enough to take a look.
Only Strangers Use the Front Door is my attempt to have Angela’s photos seen. This curated installation of 750+ of Angela’s photos and video projection of edited versions of her home movies will open on February 4th. This exhibit is, appropriately, part of Roanoke’s Marginal Arts Festival, a new fringe-style festival in Southwest Virginia that will push the boundaries of what can/should be deemed “art.”
Stay tuned for posts on the opening reception…
