I’d grown up under the weight of all those unseen photographs and unused cameras, its burden so pervasive that even the air in our house seemed to have texture and mass. I observed my father on weekends in endless rounds of cleaning cameras and restacking print piles, or looking in vain for some shot of me on the terrace made the previous summer, to no avail. The mess just grew bigger, engulfing the pantry, then the kitchen, then the library, as my father was defeated by his own inability to edit, file, and catalogue.
Maybe the saddest story of my father’s life was a missed meeting with his great idol, the renowned Life magazine photographer Alfred Eisenstaedt, who was scheduled to be on Martha’s Vineyard in the summer of 1962, at the same time my parents planned to be there with Bobby and Charlie, just toddlers at the time. My father allegedly wrote Eisenstaedt a letter telling him he would like to meet. Taken with my father’s enthusiasm for his work, Eisenstaedt responded that he’d meet my father at Gay Head beach; he named the date and time, but when the day came around, my father lost his nerve and stood his hero up.
The story was told and retold in our family, usually by my mother, and soon took on the proportions of a mythical lost chance, coming to symbolize the tragedy of my father’s unfulfilled potential. I always imagined Eisenstaedt standing alone on the beach at dawn, a tangle of Leica cameras around his neck, searching the coast for my father’s lone figure in the mist.
Now my father was reviving his lost dreams through me. “You’re a better photographer than I am,” he liked to tell me. He loaded me up with equipment and encouraged me to photograph professionally, as he wished he had done. Since I was good at shooting people, I thought I might be a fashion or editorial photographer. I read Rolling Stone and Interview, Vogue and Vanity Fair. I studied the images, practiced the different styles. I was always experimenting. I felt as if I were tipping the scales of my father’s lost chances by living the life he should have lived.
But my father’s enthusiasm and support were something on which I could rely only when his mood was right. Other times, the house shook with his fury, and I turned to my camera, heading into Detroit or setting up shoots at friends’ houses. The world through the lens was reduced to a manageable rectangle, and no chaos could penetrate the solace of the darkroom. Watching the clock while my prints developed and fixed lent predictability to my life, and I could cut a mat with the exactness of a surgeon. At the same time, my images were unpredictable, even mystifying; I never saw in my film what I thought I had through the viewfinder. I saw something realer, truer, as if separating a piece of the world from itself could somehow make the whole thing better.
FRANCES STROH, 1984
(by Eric Stroh)
Whitney and I had been lying around the house all day, watching MTV and microwaving Stouffer’s frozen French bread pizzas. The August air swelled with the metallic scent of an imminent thunderstorm. My father puttered around the house with his cameras, polishing lenses and blowing Dust-Off at me every time I walked past him in the kitchen.
He sat down and pulled a fish-eye lens out of its leather case. “Hi, Franny,” he said warmly when I glanced over his shoulder. “Got another party tonight?”
It was the summer after my senior year, and I had been out every night. My father let me drive his Voyager minivan, even though I had totaled his Buick just a few months before, resulting in emergency surgery to eradicate the hematoma trapped inside the shattered cartilage of my nose. “It’s Spence’s birthday,” I said.
Spence was my boyfriend that summer. The boyfriend who’d blown his entire summer-job salary to keep us both high on coke.
“Just don’t wreck my car,” my father said with a teasing smile. He reached out and tweaked my nose. He was in a good mood. “Make sure to avoid that fictitious dog, too, hunh?” He loved pointing out that he hadn’t bought my alibi the previous winter that I’d swerved his silver Skylark sedan into a telephone pole—on the opposite side of the road—to avoid hitting a golden retriever.
“There was a dog,” I said with a straight face.
“Right.”
It was a dark morning in January that the wreck had happened. Partying our way through the inevitable depression of a Michigan winter, my friends and I had been out all night, then attended a sunrise meditation class at the Hare Krishna mansion in Detroit. The “Krishna center” was located on the sprawling estate of the Fisher Mansion, one of the old Detroit houses emblematic of the automotive industry’s heyday, donated to the sect by Alfie Ford.
Meditation, music, drugs, and alcohol, they were all facets of the same mind-expanding trajectory—especially potent when combined. My friends and I had all read On the Road and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. And with the help of state-of-the-art amphetamines and a healthy dose of cynicism we had taken the legacy of the fifties and the sixties to new heights—in the eighties.