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Photographs
by:
© Vaughn Sills |
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The
foreward to her book is written by Robert Coles, M.D.,
Pulitzer Prize winner and professor of psychiatry and
medical humanities at Harvard University. Coles writes,
"Here 'one family' becomes a group of fellow human beings
for us grateful readers to meet and to get to know—even
as we learn, right off, from a photographer and a writer
and a teacher, who she is, how she came to be interested
in a part of the world known as the American South,
and how, also, she went about her self-appointed task
and got to do it with such arresting, convincing success."
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Sills
explains that her collaboration with the Toole family
was enhanced by the give and take of photographs with
her subjects. "Because I prefer to work with Polaroid's
Type 665 film which is a positive and negative
black-and-white film, I would give the positive to the
family when I was photographing them over the years.
People in the family could see exactly what I was doing
and they became very interested in the artistic process.
They would ask questions and make suggestions about
what we might try in representing their often-difficult
lives.
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"Family
members were really participating in the making of the
pictures. The photography was not something being done
to them. They became more engaged in the process. And
because I could give them the positives of the instant
film it became more fun for them and they were able
to create their own family albums and proudly hang portraits
on the walls of their modest homes," Sills says. |
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