Title

The Art of Storytelling

Excerpt

Date

The Art of Storytelling

Text

In this photo by Mary Ellen Mark named “The Damm Family in Their Car” shot in Los Angeles in 1987 there’s simply everything. Not only the story of a family in a frame of its life, but the one of a nation too.

Gestures and things describe everything

What do you see? A family inside a car. They are not arranged, they are posing but in a natural way, like they were really there just like that, inside what is probably their car and their home too. A poor family (portrait of a peculiar kind of people from a specific class) that owns a car and nothing else. But they take care of eachother: the father and husband embraces gently his wife, the daughter caresses and protects her younger little brother. He’s staring at something outside the frame. It’s not the photographer, we don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s the future, maybe it doesn’t look so bright.

The father’s eyes

Father, mother and daughter are looking right into the camera. They know it’s going to be like that and nothing else.
He’s saying with his eyes “That’s all I’ve got” but he’s proud of that. He cares about his family.
She the mother is abandoned into his arms. It’s like she just can’t stand no more. She’s exhausted.

Her daughter is like her, 20 or more years before. It’s like you can see the same person in different times but in the same time. And the little woman is already conscious of what’s ahead: no hope, this is our life. She’s like her mother, grown like her but in a younger body. But she knows already everything. She sadly looks into her future, behind her.

The country

Portions of the country where they live are all around: a dirty road where they parked their car and their home. Their car is probably no more a movable object: it just stands there, symbol of a broken society that doesn’t produce anything more. The same car is a frame within the frame, with its windows creating a boundary between their life and the one of the country where they live. A photographic and a symbolic one. Protection and exclusion at the same time.

The story

We didn’t know anything about the Damm family before but now we know everything. There’s their story and the story of their country at the same time. Right into a single frame. Like every story there’s a beginning, something in the middle and an end. We’re looking at the whole story in the blink of an eye. A story needs a teller and a receiver. Mary Ellen Mark is telling us the Damm story. We’re hearing, almost 30 years later.

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