Farmer's Wife

Abstract

My mother still lives on our eighty-acre family farm in Lebanon County, southeastern Pennsylvania. Since I live two-thousand miles away in New Mexico, I am able to visit only two times every year. When I am there, I photograph her and the spaces and things in the house and buildings. This world, especially the house, has not changed much since I spent my childhood there in the 1950s and 1960s. My mother began shaping it after she and my father took over the farm from his parents in 1947. It had been owned by four generations of his Swiss-German Anabaptist family. She was not so concerned about carrying on this heritage. Her family lived in town, and she had been a factory worker. She and my father just wanted to make this run-down farm a comfortable, modern home for us three children. They called it Sunnydell Farm. They wanted the best for us, the best that they could afford on a small dairy farm income. They encouraged us to be and to perform the best, to compete at school, in 4-H clubs, and children's contests, to go to college, and to be upwardly striving. Now the land is rented to neighboring farmers, the buildings stand empty, and my mother has lived alone since my father died in 1991. She continues to take care of the place as she has for fifty years. When I stay there, I am drawn back into old emotions and the intensity of our lives when I was a child. In some of my photos I attempt to recreate those feelings with toys, paper dolls, arrangements of objects, perspective. This project includes photographs, family snapshots, and stories, local history, and my autobiographical writings. I want to bring across the complex layers of cultural and personal meaning in the things and spaces there, the history of a family, and the development of a subjectivity that arises from the particularity of a time and place. I am developing a book and a CD-Rom that will include texts, photographs, digitized family photos, and imagery from papers, magazines, and greeting cards found in the house.