Forty years after she began taking pictures of her seven children, Nolan’s striking images are being published. Here the 79-year-old reveals how the gift of a camera transformed her life
Forty years after she began taking pictures of her seven children, Nolan’s striking images are being published for the first time. Here the 79-year-old former classmate of Lou Reed reveals how the gift of a camera transformed her lifeeggy Nolan had just turned 40, when, on a whim, her father gave her a Nikon camera that had been left unclaimed in his pawnshop in Miami.
“At first, I really didn’t know what I was doing,” she says, “but I remember shooting a picture through the leaves of the trees in front of the house and suddenly knowing somehow that this was how I should do it, this was how I should look. It was innate.” Since that transportive moment, Nolan, who is now 79, has taken thousands of photographs of her family, storing the prints in sealed polythene bags to protect them in the event of a hurricane hitting the house. When she finally got around to doing an edit recently, it was her eldest son, Abner, who suggested that she show them to Paul Schiek, who he had taught at school and now runs a photography book publishing company in San Francisco.
In one spread, a visceral image of a young cyclist, suspended in a midair spin high above a gaggle of teenage youths, is placed next to a photo of a young couple snogging in an eerily empty cinema. In another dramatic juxtaposition, a tiny figure jumps off a high wooden bridge into a river next to a portrait of young man lying languorously on a white wall like a fashion model. All teenage life is here, from the casually risk-taking to the artfully self-conscious.
“There were definitely times when they had the sense that I was objectifying them,” she says. “And, in a way, they did become objects because, when I photograph, I’m not thinking about the people, I’m only thinking about the edges.” Did they get used to the camera in the end? “Well, after a time, you become invisible, but also as they grow up, they begin to have a different body language. They learn how to behave in front of the camera, to put masks on. They become much more self-conscious.
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