December 20, 2009
94 Years Young. Annetta Ruth Lea. Taunton, Somerset.
Netta is my mother-in-law. She lives alone and pretty much cares for herself. Her home has always been sparse and yet spotless. I’m always amazed that she still has all her own teeth! I decided a while back it would be nice to try and take a series of photos of her house. This is one of many from a recent visit.
comments
Leave a Reply
This image reminds me of the house Deron and Deron’s folks put us up in at Clusterflockstock. If I remember correctly, Deron’s grandmother’s house. Immediately upon entering, I felt embraced. The days we spent there it were as if we were the spirits visiting instead of us visiting spirits. They were there, we were there. Who knows who was who? It now seems like a dream.
A good, good dream.
There is a a tension maintained here between exposure and concealment that I find quite affecting.
Hey, Rick and Sheila, thank you for your thoughts. It was an odd feeling wandering around someone’s house!
Phil, what your series of ‘Netta’ photos offers me is a broader slant on your photos of abandoned Cretan dwellings. We know the residents of the Cretan homes will not return, and we wonder at what they left behind. We know (because you tell us) that Netta has just stepped out, and yet we can’t reject the knowledge that one day sooner or later Netta will leave her tidy home.
You have a sensitive eye and a sensitive soul.
I now find myself taken with the round scene-painted object on the far wall above the portraits. Is it a plate? Or might it be a cover for the old flue hole where there might once have been a flue-pipe running up from a wood, coal or gas stove on the floor beneath it before central heating came to be the thing. I remember seeing such covers in relative’s houses when I was small. On some it seems there might have been a scene painted. Others, I distinctly remember. They looked like the bottoms of simple light-weight paper plates, with–what should I call it?–a rim of ripples around the perimeter? They were painted the same color as the wall. When I was small, I couldn’t figure out why someone would stick a paper plate up high on the wall like that.
Sheila, I just love your observations here. For those with an interest in the other shots I have taken there, they can be seen here.
Rick, indeed that is a plate and the portraits are of her mother and father. They were only recently discovered when her sister, Ethel died.
OK, now I’ve looked at the set and I’m taken by the modern knob on the door in one. It is delicious. The past and now, now melds. Danny and I have a collection of past and modern photographs in frames. I took them down while we painted, are painting. They are in bags, in boxes,or leaning on walls in various rooms. Family, prints, artworks, modern and past. I haven’t had it in me yet to decide where they go.
Yet I yearn for clean surfaces, y’all. There’s a part of me who would wipe it all away. And yet, Netta’s done a fine job of combining I think. With clean surfaces to boot. Perhaps I can learn a thing or two from her?
Phil. There is no way you could have contrived ths, in my mind, this is how it stands and the way it stands, speaks volumes.
Thank you, Rick, you are a dear. You are right, I had no need to touch a thing, just decide where to stand and let the camera do its thing. I guess I took about a dozen on the day which kind of work and at some stage I will try and take some close up shots of the detail around the place. It seems to have always been like this so I’d like to capture it before it changes.