A Family Album << The Photos << George Lacks

I know what you're thinking at this very moment: "Oh, God, now he wants to trot out family photos!" Believe me, I sympathize. Nothing increases the amount of boredom in the universe more rapidly, more exponentially, than when someone you barely know breaks out the scrapbooks and proceeds to dun you with hundreds of pictures of family members you neither know nor care about.

However, when such photos are taken by a professional press photographer during the 1950s, using a Graflex Speed Graphic camera with 4x5 slides to produce black-and-white images on 8x10 glossy-finished paper, well...that could be reason enough to take exception!

Blossom Claudia Santos, circa 1945 ~ Click here to view this image in context

Indeed, the intrinsic qualities of the photo constituted a major criterion when selecting the photos presented in this section. Every photograph you see here was selected because (1) it intro- duces, or otherwise portrays, a key family member without too much redundancy; (2) it may have been considered for publication in one of the L.A. newspapers, chiefly the Mirror or the Herald-Express; (3) it's an interesting and well-crafted piece even when considered outside the context of a family album; it has good composition, balance, lighting, and so on. For every photo presented here, there are at least five or six others in my

possession that didn't make the cut because they aren't sufficiently interesting, or they're too intimate and embarrassing—or they're simply lousy photographs. (Photographers are fallible just like everyone else, and my father produced his share of clunkers.)

Suzy Lacks and Zorro the cat anticipate Friday the 13th ~ Click here to view this image in context

The photos are arranged roughly in chronological order, but occasionally that order has been subverted along thematic lines; that is, photos that depict holidays, birthdays, etc., are often strung together. Among the photos in this set, you'll see quite a number in which my mother poses, sometimes alluringly, for George's "camera eye." In others, you'll get a glimpse of the little house in North Hollywood in which my siblings and I spent our early childhood years. It was a lively, characterful house, filled with books and ideas, records and music, artwork, Chinese curios and furnishings, and plenty of cool gadgetry floating about: high-tech cameras, hi-fi equipment, and the like. It was a thinking man's house, from top to bottom.

Here's hoping that you find this set more interesting than the ordinary, run-of-the-mill family album.