A Photographer Turned the Tables on His Parents to Learn About Himself

One of the distinctions he makes is between photos that are candid and those that, in his word, are “staged.” I would have used the term “posed” rather than “staged,” because he hasn’t engaged actors to impersonate his parents, and his parents are not pretending to be anyone other than themselves. Most family photos are posed by the photographer, who has an idea of how the picture should look and what story it should tell. Children, at least until they reach adolescence, rarely contest that control. But when a child is photographing a parent, the dynamic alters.

“This isn’t about me, it’s about them,” Larry says early in the play. To which Irving, his father, retorts, “Larry may say it’s about us, but trust me. It’s about him.” Of course, they’re both right. But where does the balance lie? The tension in the book and the play arises when Larry and Irving, vying for authority over the image, fall into an Oedipal struggle. (Larry’s mother, Jean, although equally aware of what’s at stake, is philosophically resigned to letting her son see it his way.)

Very sensitive about being perceived as old, Irving in the play lashes out at Larry for his photograph of the two parents, with a postcard placed between them of a young Hawaiian woman sent by Larry’s older brother, Kenny. (This photograph is not part of the Yancey Richardson exhibition.) “There’s me,” Irving says. “Old. On the other side of the table, there’s your mother. Old. And in between these two old people … is a postcard of youth. Like someone from the young past has sent a missive to these old despairing people’s present. Did you do that on purpose, Larry? Place that postcard there? Just like that?”

In his father’s home movies of his childhood, Larry detects, as he puts it in the book, “more a record of hopes and fantasies than actual events.” A child is a seemingly blank slate on which parents can project their dreams. Many years later, photographing his father, Sultan is depicting the way that hopes and fantasies wither. Irving rose from the ranks to become a vice-president of the Schick Safety Razor Company, but at the age of 56, he was fired, and his career was over. He described to his son the brief termination meeting with his boss, but there is no visual documentation of that decisive moment.