THINKING ABOUT MY MOTHER
An installation of 9 wet plate collodion photographic images on 8'“ x 10” aluminum, of a vintage typewriter found on the streets of San Francisco.
During my exploration regarding communication control and selfhood today, I remembered my mother started her working career as a stenographer, a shorthand typist. I remember her early typewriter, powder coated cast iron body, pale green with a black and red ribbon which had a musty carbon smell, when I was a child. I remember her pounding away vigorously at the keys, 60 words a minute, writing letters, making teaching materials, and filling up her recipe book.
The typewriter in the images was the kind of machine she had learnt to type on. The keys are shiny black buttons on long arms that need to be pressed very deep, more like piano keys, unlike our smooth keyboards today. I found this old Woodstock typewriter in the gutter in San Francisco while I was working on a fashion shoot, and I carried back home and kept looking at it for years wondering what its significance to me was.
Finally, while thinking about my mother - after the death of my father, I began to make 8” x 10” tintype plates of the machine. It is heavy I can barely lift it, she talked of the identification of this machine with women’s work, attempting human precision and speed in spite of the physicality of the act of typing. I thought of how using a traditional process to explore communication and self from a historic and a contemporary perspective, is for me again a deliberate slowing down of the frenetic pace of our communication today, taking a step back to observe and compare images and reductive words we throw out in to the world via the internet, often with a lot less care and consciousness than ever before.
These machines are of the Victorian era and throughout my childhood my mother always described herself as very Victorian. In line with this thought I placed the typewriter on a pedestal covered with a black fabric and swirled it in varying ways like a dress from the 19th Century.
I found that the typewriter began to have a personality and a different mood with every variation in dress. It seemed more like a portrait, describing a time, a place, a mood and a human, rather than just an image of a typewriter.
My mother has continued on to a freelance writing career.