It is quite possible, I think, that she had never seen her likeness before, not even in a mirror, and that the photograph was a far cry from what she imagined herself to be. I have often wondered that she objected so to her likeness, for it was a true likeness, as far as I could tell. She set up such a jabber, indeed, that no one could understand her, and she left in a great huff. But when she took a look at it, she was deeply disturbed, and she would have nothing to do with it. And when the old woman came, my father presented it to her proudly. At last the day came when the print arrived. Having photographs processed was a slow business then in that part of the world. Every day thereafter she would come to the house and ask to see the print, and every day my father had to tell her that it had not yet come back in the mail. She made a wonderful subject, and I have always thought very well of the photograph that my father made of her. She was a gnarled old woman with gray hair and fine pronounced features. One day an old Navajo crone came to our house and asked to have her picture taken. In the essay “The Photograph” Momaday contrasts his memory of this vital community with the partial view presented in one particular image. 1 He enjoyed hearing his father exchange greetings and jokes with people along the way and welcome all who came in their wagons to the Low Mountain Trading Post from the “immense and wild” land that surrounded them.
Scott Momaday often accompanied his father in his work for the Roads Department on the Navajo reservation and watched him take informal portraits of their neighbors. 1 My thanks to Nathalie Massip for the invitation to present some of the ideas in this essay at the “ (.)ġAs a child growing up in Jemez, New Mexico, Kiowa writer N.
0 kommentar(er)
