Griswold Photographic Series
Dublin Core
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When Minnie Griswold died in 1952, her son Charles closed her house and left it as it was, maintaining it undisturbed as an act of reverence and devotion. It was her family home place and she had lived there as a widow with three children, one of whom died, since 1900. This series, which was made in 1986 when Charles gave Neil Rappaport permission to photograph in the house, explores the dimensions of human permanence.
"At first it was the material world which captured me. I was surrounded by so many antique and beautiful things! The visible presence of the past in the rooms, on shelves and surfaces, and in drawers, gave witness to a way of life I had only heard about from people who could remember the century's turn. I innocently began to document as directly and richly as possible. Gradually the process of photographing was transformed into an exploration of this spirit, which still held tenancy here. Minnie was a reader, of religious tracts, the Bible and other literature. Fortunately for my exploration, she marked and underlined what she found provocative, leaving a trail of the ideas and questions with which she grappled.
"The idea that people inhabit their objects and rooms had been suggested to me by all of my portrait work, and at Minnie's I was testing it in depth. I searched for the most specific evidence of her experience…. A realization about Minnie altered my photographic approach. Minnie had an absolute passion for color. It was everywhere. Her favorites were painted on walls, wallpapered, collected in every variety of printed materials, and revealed in her own amateur paintings. Black and while photography would tell of too somber a Minnie Griswold; its portrayal would make too much of her tragedies, too little of her joys. The photographs would have to be open to hand coloring if any sense of her true spirit was to be conveyed. My part in the photographs was to discover the fragments of spirit in the house and to assemble them as an expressive entity. Some attempt to express Minnie's spirit esthetically while creating simple documentary evidence." (Neil Rappaport)
Susanne Rappaport would hand color a large group of these images using the technique of coloring photographs with oil paints employed before the days of color film in photography and very popular at the time Minnie Griswold lived in this house as a young woman. The color gives a kind of living energy to the image space as each black-and-white image is illuminated anew. Since color accuracy was a clear aim, the colorings of interior spaces and arrangements of objects were done at the house, infusing them with "the life that is in things," that Charles Griswold must have felt every time he entered the house after his mother's death.
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