The Show's ANALOGS series is about people who make things by hand — and what those things tell us about those people.
And it’s my love for this artist in particular that made me want to tell these stories in the first place.
In case you haven’t noticed, I’m fascinated by people who make things by hand. And as you’ve listened to these segments over the last few weeks, maybe the thought has crossed your mind: why is this dude so hung up on this?
And the answer is: because of my mom.
"Do you remember what you told me once is what you’re looking for when you’re evaluating the work of … someone’s work? You told me once there’s thing you’re looking for? MOM: Did I tell you it’s the mark of the hand?," I asked.
My mom is an artist — her name is Claudia Smigrod. She works primarily in photography, her photographs are in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress and a bunch of other places.
She loves working with old cameras — you know those old-timey pictures you’ve seen of photographers under a sheet, bent over at the waist, looking through a giant wooden contraption with a lens on the end of it? My mom does that kind of photography.
Sometimes, she makes photographs without a camera at all. I’ve watched her do it by punching a hole in a popcorn tin, lining the inside of the tin with black paper, and then pointing the hole at the thing she wants to take a picture of and shining light through it.
I have no idea how that results in a photograph. I’ve asked her to explain it, but I never understand the explanation. That’s partly because I have a very feeble brain when it comes to science. But it’s also because I don’t want to know the scientific explanation. What I really want to understand is what makes her think to do that in the first place.
"There’s nowhere to sit! That’s true, there’s nowhere to sit. Here … OK, there … All right," Smigrod said.
Last fall, when I was visiting my mom in Virginia for her birthday, we set up two chairs in a cluttered room on the second floor of her house. This room is packed floor to ceiling with packages of photo paper, empty frames and shoeboxes full of darkroom chemicals.
"This is my studio! This is where I stand and make everything, and look out the window, with the beautiful north light, and it’s on the second floor. So, it’s kind of like a tree house. My tree house — inside," Smigrod said.
That thing my mom said about the mark of the hand — it’s one of those things a parent says off-handedly that echoes in your mind for the rest of your life. It just imprinted on me — this idea that everything we make should bear the mark of the hand. Because if it doesn’t — well, I don’t know, exactly. It’s less valid? Not art? This is what I wanted to ask my mom about.
"I like when something looks like it was made by hand. Because that’s, to me, what making things … is," Smigrod said.
For the last few years, my mom has been teaching and taking photographs at VMI — the Virginia Military Institute. As you can maybe guess, when she’s there, she sticks out like a sore thumb. VMI is this cluster of stark, old crenelated buildings that look like medieval prisons, and everywhere you look there’s students, who VMI calls “cadets," marching around in jackets with gold buttons and starched white pants. And then there’s my mom, wearing a pastel scarf and brushing her hair out of her face as she wheels her giant wooden camera up to a group of cadets and asks if she can take their picture.
That afternoon in the treehouse, she showed me one of the photographs she made of a cadet. It’s a jarring, kind of haunting image: this broad-shouldered young man with heavy shadows under his eyes. Towards the bottom of his body, the image gets a little blurry — it sort of looks like he’s dissolving.
"So then there’s this light leak in the camera — see the light leak? And that was the gift," Smigrod said.
To be clear: the dissolution effect in the image isn’t there because mom put it there. It just happened when she took the picture. At the time, she didn’t know it was going to be there — she discovered it when she printed the photograph in the darkroom. And to be even more clear: She was thrilled. For her, this was the thing that elevated the picture into something more than just a picture.
"One of the things that always bothered me was that photography was two dimensional. How do you make it look three-dimensional? How do you use the camera to do that?" Smigrod said.
"So how do you do that?" I asked.
"Well, you use the camera," Smigrod said.
That’s kind of a classic Claudia Smigrod-ism right there. This sort of zen proclamation that I can tell she means very sincerely — even if I don’t totally know what she means. It happens a lot when I ask her about her work. In fact, it happened again that afternoon, when she showed me a photograph of one of those medieval-looking VMI buildings. It was bathed in this kind of ethereal light.
"It looks like the building is like, from another dimension," I said.
"Right — it doesn’t really look like the building. Wherever I am is just the starting point. The buildings kind of grow out of ground — they’re myth, they’re epic. In order to create depth, you have to have foreground, middleground, background. So how do you put that there when it doesn’t exist?" Smigrod said.
"So how do you put that there? " I said.
"Well, I just make it happen with the camera. Yeah," Smigrod said.
I think the reason I’m so hung up on this idea of the mark of the hand is that it feels like the answer to whatever my mom is talking about when she says these vaguely mystical things.
"I used to think, when I wasn’t thinking, that this is the way everyone saw. I mean, I didn’t think it was the way everyone saw, I just … it was obvious to me the way something could be. And then I realized that other people don’t see things that way. And so, what I do when I use the camera is I figure out how to translate my personal version of what I’m creating into the image itself," Smigrod said.
Not long ago, mom told me, she showed these VMI pictures to a friend.
"She says these make the hair on my arm stand on end. She said no one would even think to make these pictures. Why are you even doing this? I’m like, how could you not make these pictures? How could you not do this? And if you’re in a place where everything looks the same, all the buildings look the same, everyone’s wearing the same uniform, everyone’s looking the same, I have to look deeper than that. And it’s fascinating to me. Because the picture doesn’t really even look like them. It’s them, but it’s really me. That’s what it is," Smigrod said.
"So, I think something you just said helped me understand something that I have gotten from you that I wasn’t conscious of previously. I find sometimes that if I’m making a radio story, I will have spoken to somebody, because they have a story to tell. And then I will have made a version of that story, and it’s my version of the story — it’s what I thought was interesting," I said.
"Of course!" Smigrod said.
"... About the story. And they’ll say, 'That’s not the story I told you.' Or, 'I don’t think of my story that way.' I think the thing I’ve never wanted to admit to myself is what you just said. It’s my story now. You told it to me, and I turned it into something else," I said.
"That’s the mark of the hand," Smigrod said.
Just when it seemed like I was starting to get, my mom told me that she doesn’t really think of herself as a photographer.
"I don’t think about who I am. I just think of myself as someone who makes things," Smigrod said.
"Why is it important to be a person who makes things?" I asked.
"Well, I guess it’s just because it’s … who I am," Smigrod said.
There she goes again.
