Notes on “Child’s Worldview” – currently on display in the exhibit “Ready for my Closeup”

I am currently displaying photographs at the gallery at NewTV in Newton. This is a 2 person show, with Eric Myrvaagnes. More info at http://fishermural.com/photoPrints/closeUp.html

This is an extended version of the notes posted at the exhibit:

Child’s Worldview (1967 Coin Collection)
2009  Artist’s Proof.
This is an experimental image – part of a series of images I hope to create based on my childhood coin collection.

In these coins I see the simple worldview of my ten-year-old self. Each coin a beautiful miniature that had passed from hand to hand in distant places. No mint coins in this collection. Well worn coins, fascinating for their acquired patina of use. I hear a jingling in far away pockets.

In these coins I also find a strong sense of loss. The mid 60s was a time of the birth of the Peace Corps, and of conspicuous American largess. It seems in my childish memory that every day the newspapers carried a photo of men in famine stricken countries joyously hefting great sacks of US grain off of mountainous shipments. Though The Cold War and the Viet Nam war were in full swing, they did not meaningfully intrude on my understanding, did not yet provide complex sub-text to every headline. Daily images of the destructive power of napalm were still a few years away. I see these coins now, and am wistful for that simple worldview – that confidence in both America’s benevolence and in the gratefulness of the world that received it.

The Napoleonic coin from the 1850s (the dark one at the bottom) and the 5 centime from 1919 would have had seemed equally antique to me. I can recall that, as a child, anything older than about 25 years passed into the category of history – distant and mythic. The ’20s, 30s and even the 40s seemed hardly less distant than the civil war era. Perhaps it was the scale of events that dominated those years – the Great War, the Great Depression, World War II.

The cloth is one that my mother embroidered in the mid 60s. While she no longer embroiders, she was prolific from the 50s thru the 70s. Her linens and blankets were part of our everyday life. I recall sitting with her to learn each of the various stitches that made up these flowers, tho I never achieved her fluid and easy rhythm.  Daisy stitch, satin stitch, French knot, crewel stitch.