Sign your own permission slip for life
Photographer Ann Torrence contributed a wonderful piece of art for Life is a Verb, and now a marvelous essay as part of the LIAV Blog Tour ’08. Here’s an excerpt:
I was raised in a maternal lineage whose motto was "Oh no, I couldn’t." The constraints of Germanic heritage, Catholic Church dictums and social decorum bound as tightly as my great- great- grandmother Josephine’s corsets. So many rules: from the stuffed celery on the Thanksgiving relish tray to the proper shades for nail polish. And ladies certainly did not traipse about alone after dark.
Oddly, my tribe of women has a history of spectacular break-outs: before she married, my great-grandmother Amelia traveled alone from Pittsburgh to Pasadena where she saw one of the first Rose Bowl Parades. My widowed grandmother Rosemary packed her children and her mother Amelia into the family car and moved them all to California in the 1950s. After she raised her children, Rosemary went back to school and became an LA County Social Worker in the turbulent 1960s, when nice white ladies didn’t go to Watts. Her daughter, my mother, re-invented herself from housewife to Fortune 500 executive in the space of my 7-12 grade years.
We break out and then something snaps, as if we see ourselves in our Josephine’s fearful, disapproving eyes. We stand tall and straighten our imaginary tiaras, handed down like a treasured heirloom, the crown that says, "I am a good girl."
You can read the rest of her essay here, then explore her blog–from an essay on being a woman photographer to her extraordinary photographs of the world around us, you will love what you find there.
