W.M. Hunt

 #somereallygoodones, #family, #pikejohn, #merrychristmasfromallthejohns, #eugeniaparry, #vietnam

This may seem like a digression but keep faith, I’ll get to the pictures.  

I wrote much of the text for my book, “The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious” at night in Lausanne, Switzerland, during the Winter Olympics in 2006.  It seems like a lifetime ago.  As I wrote the text, a couple of themes emerged: that to a collector, images are all self-portraits, which by extension are also photographs of you, the reader. Also, collecting brought me a sense of self-esteem sorely lacking earlier in my life.  Further, there is the notion in the book that all of the works I collected somehow act like pages in the journal of a life, consciously or unconsciously. Note that the subtitle, “Photographs from the Unconscious,” came from my English publisher, Thomas Neurath. I like it, although I worry that it sounds like I bought all of those photographs while I was in a coma.

In editing the text for the book, many names and some anecdotes got lost along the way, and I would like to share a particularly meaningful story:

The collection got international visibility when Francois Hebel, the executive director Les Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France, approached me about doing a show. Curiously enough Susan Meiselas, the photographer, had directed him to me without her ever actually having seen the collection. The show was a big hit.

I knew there would be no time to do a catalogue, but I wanted there to be some record of the exhibition. I went to three women who have been very important to me in terms of how I approach photography and the evolution of my “eye,” and asked them to interview me.  They are Janet Borden, legendary dealer in New York City, who was influential in my earliest collecting by pointing me towards meaningful work. I also have a long association with the equally celebrated Alison Nordstrom, the former senior curator at the George Eastman House, whom I have known since her days as a curator in Daytona Beach, Florida, where she had a dazzlingly inventive and thoughtful program.

The third is Eugenia Parry, who lives in New Mexico. Nia is the most brilliant person I know who thinks and writes about photography.

I encountered her first at a walk through of a Joel-Peter Witkin retrospective. Her approach to photography was liberating for me. She looks at an image, reacts, and speaks about it meaningfully, articulately and personally. She wants work to resonate, to be evocative. She taught a generation of curators at Smith College and the University of New Mexico. Witkin says of her that Nia understands him better than he does. 

For Arles, I interviewed her about me, a wonderfully self-serving device, but she made sure it was full of information about the history of collectors, back to Andre Jammes with whom she had collaborated extensively on nineteenth century work. 

And she drew me out. I told her a story of a friend named Colin John — Pike to me. We had gone to the University of Michigan and known each other slightly but not really liked each other much. Our parents knew each other, and a friendship seemed forced. It was the end of 1960s, and we got drafted into the Army on the same day. There we were in Detroit, the butts of some unfunny existential joke.

Soon we were on the bus together to Fort Knox and ended up as bunk mates for eight of the most horrendous weeks of our young lives: basic training. At the end of it, he was there the moment I was handed the information that my M.O.S (Military Occupational Specialty) was to be 11-Bravo: infantry. This was the fourth feather, the ultimate black dot. It was in effect a death notice, because I was undoubtedly bound for Vietnam, and I knew that I was not that good at soldiering.

That day I came as close as ever to fully losing my shit.

The happier bend in the road is that I did go to Vietnam—impotently waving my master’s degree in speech—and had a wonderful and life-changing time. I had finessed a great job at the military radio and TV station (“Good Morning Vietnam,” except at night and with classical music). Pike followed a couple of months later to Saigon. We reconnected and drank and laughed and smoked way too much pot together.

After the military he got married to a wife who didn’t seem to like me too much and we drifted apart. Then 20 years later my college girlfriend called to say Pike had collapsed and died of a heart attack. Boom.

It was very sad. I loved him. He was a wonderful man.

But the unspeakable part was that a piece of my history was gone forever. Vanished. He had been my witness. That was gone.

Nia took this in, and then she said, “He was your photograph.”

For me, that is one of most brilliant statements about how photographs behave. They are our histories. Photographs do many things, but the one thing they do incomparably is to serve as the record. 

And now there is more to tell.  Where is that Great Photograph for this section?

A dozen years ago I organized and curated a show in New York called “Year to Year: Family Photographs” with works I would describe as domestic images — professional and amateur — that repeat periodically.  Examples would be family photos of birthday parties or reunions or Junior visiting Santa at ages 4, 5 and 6 or long-term projects that artists have intended, systematically documenting family members over time, like Nicholas Nixon and the Brown sisters (his wife and three sister-in-law photographed in the same arrangement for ___ years).

I was addressing the notion of how families self-identify as they chronicle themselves.  One way is through Holiday cards, annual family reports for friends and extended family.

The most spectacular piece in the exhibition was a wall grid with 30 years of “Merry Christmas from all the Johns”.  My friend Pike’s family.  This was their holiday greetings: always an accordion style foldout with 7 panels, red borders, Christmas design accents, and black and white portraits of the members of the Colin John family from Birmingham Michigan. 

There is Mom - Marty - and Dad - Colin - and the 5 kids - Sally, Pike (Colin, Jr.), Tryna, W.A.P, and Jennifer. Each was featured on their own page with their respective mates, children, and pets from 1960 to 1990, from JFK to George H.W. Bush, a period of dramatic social and political change. 

Visually the cards are striking. This was undoubtedly because Colin John, Sr. was a successful advertising art director in Detroit. The cards each measure about 5 1/4 x 4 inches with a bright red border around individual black and white portraits.  Simple line drawings of Christmas ephemera — wreaths and candy canes — sometimes appear on the title page. 

Amazingly two unnamed photographers appear to have shot all of the portraits further giving the set an unexpected continuity, strength and handsomeness.  The second one appears to have been the younger son, Wap John whose graphics company scanned these images fort his book…

There are captions under the images from the second year on, and these both offer and withhold histories. Divorces and separations aren’t mentioned in the text; people simply don’t reappear. Illnesses are alluded to The modern era - Kennedy, Cuba, Watergate, Vietnam, Sputnik, the Moon, the Cold War, the revolutions: sexual and political.  In the past tense, after recovery. 

In the same way, "Merry Christmas from all the Johns” chronicles the story of a upper middle class white family, living comfortably in the verdant suburbs of Detroit, it mimics the television families of the period, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson, the Cleavers ("Leave it to Beaver”) and Donna Reed. 

This is a very homogenized public stereotype, suitable for dissemination as what purported to be the archetypal American family of the 1960s on. No blacks, no Jews, no poor people.

Not until the 1973 release of the  memorable documentary television series, "An American Family," the story of the Louds in Santa Barbara, California was this mantle of Anglo fantasy perfection really examined in public. Our contemporary generation of reality tv series, the Kardashians most spectacularly, is its legacy.

But this is the story of John family. Typical and atypical.

There is even more back story to this.  My family and the John family were known to each other as far back as my grandparents I believe, but my first sense of them was this card.  My younger sister and I were always very critical of it, repeating year after year.  At some point we did meet them.  Our parents were friends and then the oldest son Colin, Jr. and I went other University of Michigan at the same time, but we were disdainful of each other until that fateful day at the draft board in Detroit. 

This is a remarkable and telling history.  They - The Johns - were YOUR photograph.

©2021

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