He was then 88 years old. The disease had begun to creep up on him about ten years earlier, shortly after he closed his pciture-framing business, the Framery, in Pleasantdale Center, West Orange, after a 20-year run.
While visiting him in the hospital one day, I took this picture while he was in the bathroom. The collapsed face of the phone represented both itself and something more. It took advantage of photography’s ability to transcend its own literalism while adhering faithfully to it.
The Framery meant a great deal to my father, who never went to college and–despite artistic talent and an only sporadically gregarious nature–spent most of his career as a wholesale furniture salesman, even at one time a Fuller Brush Man.
When he opened the Framery in his mid-50s, my father for the first time in his career was his own boss and had a store with his name on the sign out front. For once he had an office that did not have a steering wheel and license plates.
Instead of driving all over New Jersey, showing his lamps and furnishings to store managers at their desks, he now had customers coming to him, seeking his advice on how to frame their family portraits, needlepoint creations, posters, and paintings.
After he closed the store, where he had always worked alone (he never found an assistant he could put up with, or vice versa), his confidence began to oscillate and retreat. Then Alzheimer’s cut in like an unwanted dance partner, greedy and overbearing, slowly edging him to the margins.
I had learned so much from him–how to drive a stick shift, how to play tennis (he had great strokes, which I could never master), how to ice skate (I stank at that, too). From him came my love for photography.
As a GI in World War II, he had been assigned to the post office at Valley Forge Army Hospital. One day an officer asked him if he knew how to take pictures. He didn’t, but anything seemed better than lugging mail sacks. So he said he did, knowing he could learn quickly. (He had already made the Army base newspaper for his prowess as a sculptor.)
Soon he had a new assignment–photographing wounded soldiers as they were admitted to Valley Forge hospital for reconstructive surgery, and recording their condition as treatment progressed. It was a grisly and disturbing task, but infinitely safer than being on the battlefield.
When I was in my early teens, I came across a cardboard box full of closeup color photos he had made at the hospital. Each picture was on a thick glass slide, almost the size of a postcard.
I was unprepared for what I saw.
Heart-rending images of men without jaws, with stumps in place of limbs, with jagged flesh wounds. Something about the clinical detachment of the pictures–the lurid color, the stomach-turning clarity and detail, the stoic visages of the startlingly young men, still brave soldiers though their fighting days were over–made the pictures more frightening than any battlefield photos I had ever seen.
Why that didn’t turn me off to photography I’m not sure. I didn’t blame the medium or question the medical utility of such pictures. I wondered how many of these men, who were much younger than any of my teachers, had emerged from their ordeals emotionally whole and put to shame those more fortunate.
I had already decided to be a writer. I was writing long before I began taking pictures. But my father’s slides might have contributed to my reserving photography for personal exploration and allusion conducted undercover through the smokescreen of color and form and the photographic bedrock of literal description.
My father died on March 3, 2007, a Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath, four days short of his 90th birthday on the secular calendar but exactly on his birthday on the Jewish lunar calendar.