Sitting for Mrs. Siegfried
It’s late fall 1972, months after my third birthday. I am in Mrs. Siegfried’s western New York portrait studio on the corner of Third Street and Hall Avenue, not for the first time. She photographed me after I turned one-year old. Lum’s, the casual restaurant with the red facade where my mother waitresses, is next door. It’s where she met the married man who would become my father, in biological terms only.
Mrs. Siegfried is kind but aloof, a different type of woman from those who are raising me — Nana, my mother, Aunts Pat and Anne — repressed, if not, depressed housewives with the exception of my unruly, unwed mom. The photographer is tall and sturdy, swift and confident. She has assumed proprietorship of her late husband’s portrait studio, the best in our humble furniture manufacturing town.
Nanu, my grandfather, a photography aficionado since his time in war, sent us here. In recent years, Mr. and Mrs. Siegfried bought cars from his dealership, and they photographed him, his other grandchildren, and my aunts and uncles, though never my mother. She drives me to the studio in her orange MG Coupe, not out of love or respect for her father, photography, or the preservation of memory, but to affirm my worth and her own through my beauty. To ensure that affirmation, she hovers stage right, behind the lights, hawklike, ready to smooth a stray hair, making silent observations from which to draw criticisms once we leave.
I am perched on a platform that suggests a living room floor. This is how it’s done, I note. The quiet space is dark save for the lights that shine on me. Mrs. Siegfried stands not far away, bobbing ghostlike underneath the black focusing cloth behind her 4 x 5. It’s the same style camera that I will use to make the images in Coastline, my graduate thesis project, many years later.
While my expression appears placid, what preceded was a morning of tears. In truth, my hair is curly, not straight. My skin is allergic to wool, even if purchased from Bigelow’s, and my spirit is already averse to tights and patent leather. Achieving those symmetrical pigtails meant sitting under the blow dryer, its shrieking motor barely muffling my mother’s expletives as she brushed my hair limp.
My eyes reflect not just the lights, but also a brightness that is misaligned with the memory of my childhood. My smile seems true, as unlikely as that is before a stranger and her camera. And my body appears relaxed, despite being shrouded in scratchy fabrics and propped in a pose as antithetical to my three-year old self as the pearls around my left wrist. For the first time since Mrs. Siegfried photographed me two years earlier, I cease being the bastard child. I am not, while on that stage, my mother’s nemesis. Nor am I Nana and Nanu’s burden. Mrs. Siegfried, through her loupe and lens, likely a 210 mm, sees me as the little girl that I am.
