Who Is Changed And Who Is Dead
Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, Ahndraya Parlato, Mack Books.
In the late 19th century, photography was often an arduously slow process, with long exposure times even in brightly lit situations. One resultant convention of portraiture was the hidden mother photograph, in which a mother would be obscured by a large swath of fabric as they held a child still in order to keep them from moving during the sometimes minutes-long exposure. Mothers, therefore, perform an invisible but essential labor in these photographs; they appear as disembodied hands, or a vague outline behind a chintz chair. They are sometimes the chair themselves, draped in fabric patterned after Victorian sensibilities – or more often, in black.
The images are often unsettling: the women – included in the photograph but intended to be ignored despite their bedsheet-ghost-like appearance – often hold babies in their laps, giving both mother and child the appearance of “hovering between one world and the next” [Bathurst, 2013].
Ahndraya Parlato’s book, Who Is Changed and Who Is Dead, bears a hidden mother portrait on its cover, with an important distinction: there is no baby. It is a startling photographic entry to a stunning contemplation of parenthood, especially in the wake of devastating loss. Parlato threads a deeply personal narrative together with historical and political reflections, further interweaving photographs that teem with devastating beauty.
The first words in the book are a gut-punch. “SPOILER: THEY DIE.” Though it is a universal truth–everything, of course, dies, and this is far from a spoiler – most people attempt to avoid thinking of death and loss in their daily lives. Parlato’s text clearly defines two experiences that preclude one from this sort of avoidance: the death of a parent and the birth of a child. Through her narrative text, we learn that Parlato’s mother died by suicide, and her grandmother was thereafter brutally murdered. When she became a parent herself, these tragic circumstances caused Parlato to reflect on the deep seated anxiety that comes with loving someone so dearly while knowing that you cannot protect them from mortality.
Ahndraya Parlato, images from Who is Changed and Who is Dead (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.
A white house peeks out of the corner of a double-exposed photograph, layered with a ghostly echo of itself. The elements of the photograph could easily be comforting in another composition: sunlight streams through green leaves on a tall tree in the yard of the house, and the house itself seems to be old, but sturdy, in good repair. Houses, of course, represent domesticity, safety, the wholeness of family. Instead, the doubling of the house and its off-kilter angle in the corner of the frame recall film’s dutch angles, signaling to the viewer that something is indeed wrong; even the light evokes Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides: hazy and diffused, obscuring a lurking darkness. It later becomes clear that this is the house where Parlato’s mother died.
This is only one of the many contradictions that Parlato examines, both textually and visually. She acknowledges the primal nature of parenting, that so much of it comes from instinct, but concedes, too, that motherhood is disorienting, in so many ways unnatural. Much of her writing grapples with the idea that living with the pain of loss, even if it is premature, feels sometimes more difficult to process than death itself. It seems to be a feeling common amongst those who have lost their mothers to death. In her essay The Unmothered, Ruth Margalit writes, “I’ve learned that some mourners experience anticipatory grief, mourning their loved ones before they have died, while others experience delayed grief—a postponed reaction to the loss. It might sound strange, but I used to think that I experienced both” [Margalit, np].
The symbolism in the photographs bears out these paradoxes, too. The richness of a small pile of red fruit, possibly pomegranates, calls forth associations with vitality and fertility, while the fruit’s visible decay connects it unquestioningly to death. The vibrance of cut flowers in glasses full of water feel celebratory and funerary all at once, some blooms drooping or even entirely dehydrated. Handmade ceramic vessels that Parlato describes collecting are overtly connected to the womb, to a woman’s body as a vessel, but many lie empty in their photographs, abandoned by their makers and owners to secondhand stores.
Ahndraya Parlato, images from Who is Changed and Who is Dead (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.
Parlato’s images are not simply illustrative of the text, but instead create their own narrative. Using warm golden-hour light in several photographs, Parlato includes the deep black shadows within the frame created by the intense illumination of afternoon sun. A photograph of her daughter Ava, in which Ava’s body is overexposed, bright white against a black backdrop, describes the joy that Ava brings to her life. But that light brings dark with it; photographs of numerous caves and shadows call forth the dark thoughts that plague a parent’s consciousness, the unrelenting anticipation of loss that comes with loving someone.
Using shadow not only as a metaphor, but as a practice, Parlato’s book also includes several photograms made with her mother’s cremains, by placing the ashes on the surface of light-sensitive paper and exposing it to light. Because the light is blocked by the ashes, the paper remains light-colored where they make contact with its surface, while the rest of the paper is altered by colorful lighting. The photograms are also distinguished by their texture; they have a high-gloss appearance, allowing one to see a hazy, blurry reflection alongside the remains of Parlato’s mother, forcing the viewer to reckon with their own mortality.
Ahndraya Parlato, image from Who is Changed and Who is Dead (MACK, 2021). Courtesy the artist and MACK.
Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, “The loved body is immortalized by the mediation of a precious metal, silver… to which we might add the notion that this metal, like all the metals of Alchemy, is alive” [Barthes, 81]. Parlato makes manifest of this idea in her photograms, enshrining the shadow of her mother’s ashes on the very same precious metal that Barthes describes. Though her mother is not there, the photograph contains her–“a relentless presence despite physical absence” [Parlato, 37].
Ahndraya Parlato’s book dredges grief from all of the places it hides in us, its own relentless presence one that can color every day, regardless of whether the loss is in our past or merely one we anticipate.
Bibliography
Barthes, R.; Howard, R. (2020). Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Vintage Classics.
Bathurst, B. (2013, December 2). The lady vanishes: Victorian Photography’s hidden mothers. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/dec/02/hidden-mothers-victorian-photography
Margalit, R. (2014, May 9). The unmothered. The New Yorker. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-unmothered
Parlato, A. (2021). Who is changed and who is dead. MACK.
