Instamatic Karma

… in which Ashley's parents renounce shutterbuggery.

Among the resentments of childhood that I cherish in my old age is the realization that my parents never took a photo of their children in our Halloween costumes. Not once. No snapshot of my sister as Raggedy Ann or me as the Phantom of the Opera or my brother in his movie-quality Planet of the Apes getup. Their own children, looking their most glamorous, on the most magical holiday of their young lives, and the folks couldn’t tear themselves away from Gunsmoke long enough to preserve the precious memories.

I can already hear you meekly rising to their defense. They housed you and fed you, you contest. They bought you all those Milk Duds and movie tickets.¹ They scheduled your haircuts and roofied you with NyQuil when you got the sniffles. Who cares about some stupid photo?

Oh, but if this were only an isolated offense. What the evidence suggests, Your Honor, is that Mr. and Mrs. Holt were routinely negligent in their responsibility as “event” photographers. Many family holidays and formal celebrations took place with no documentation. Birthdays came and went without a shutter click. Some Christmases were photographed, others weren’t. Even my brother’s innumerable baseball games went unrecorded. It was a parental duty, they assumed, enough fulfilled by enduring these kiddie shindigs in the first place, without getting all Diane Arbus about it. Our parents may have sometimes been obligated to attend field days, school plays, ping-pong championships, spelling bees, homecoming parades, Cub Scout meetings, or dance recitals, but the Pentax generally sent its regrets.

In their defense, folks hailing from Depression-era Podunk, as our parents had, were not raised to expect amateur flashbulbs at every barn dance or peach festival. Even weddings went unrecorded in those dark days, with only Brownie snaps of the newlyweds standing next to the barn as souvenirs of the big day.² Photography was for memorializing family members in their church clothes, posing amidst the azaleas, certainly not for any cosplay tomfoolery.

So disinterested were my parents in chronicling family occasions in pictures that, for many years, we didn’t even own a camera. My father periodically borrowed a collapsible Polaroid 225 from work. This meant that the few photos taken were of whatever domestic nothingness was in effect when that camera happened to be in the house ³: sleeping dogs, random phone calls, the opening of soup cans. There’s even a Polaroid of me, age two, thumbing through an album of extremely dull Polaroids. But no photos of me in my absolutely smashing werewolf makeup.

What was odd about this arrangement was that our father considered himself something of a photographer. And as we all know, when folks announce that they’re “getting into photography,” what they usually mean is that they’re getting into photography gear – pricey light meters, luxury-brand lenses, and imported shoulder straps, the technical variations of which they intend to discuss endlessly. Not so with our father, a spirited savant unconcerned with the trivial mechanics of the art. Here was a photographic visionary so pure that he didn’t need to actually buy his own Nikon, nor take more than a dozen photos over the course of his career.

I suppose we’d have to put John Holt in the Irving Penn school of photography. He didn’t capture family life as it occurred, but art-directed his children as the muse commanded, as if we were modeling Sears Activewear or posing for bubblegum cards. He was famous for his signature “arm around a tree” motif, in which we held a random elm close like prom date. Desperately, he posed me in linebacker squats and batting positions, hoping the allure of sports stardom would inspire me to the field. His masterpiece, we all agreed, was the infamous Bat Triptych, in which he and my brother sit on the couch, brandishing full-scale baseball bats, on either side of our clearly annoyed mother, who is holding an infant me, who is clutching a miniature, baby-sized bat. Go Team! Realizing he would never top this tour de force, he put his pictorial ambitions aside.

As advancements in photo development…developed, our appropriated Polaroid was replaced by a Kodak Pocket Instamatic, a camera we owned outright after three easy payments. Sadly, this new, full-time camera documented a decided lack of togetherness afflicting Team Holt – more photos, less family. As the eldest Holt children were entering their teen years, avoiding the homestead in favor of Boz Scaggs dance parties and midnight showings of Rocky Horror⁴, photographic evidence of their activities was discouraged within their ranks. As this left the Kodak to my childish whims, I shot endless rolls of action figure battles and choice Space Giants scenes from the TV screen, which I expected my father to develop at Revco. Somehow, when Christmas morning rolled around, we were out of film.

Though it goes without saying, I will note that our father, a stolen-Polaroid purist, did not adapt to the new video technology of the 1980s. Other, younger dads might’ve been panning camcorders over each and every birthday gift Tyler and Amber opened, but having endured decades of television, my father concluded that too many things had been filmed already. And so, naturally, no video corroboration of my spectacular October 31 performance as Gene Simmons exists. (I’m uncertain at this point if “recorded no videos” should receive its own separate category on my resentments list or not.)

At a certain point, our parents simply retired from family photography altogether. This officially ensured a status of equal-opportunity neglect among us, as I, having outgrown my child-star cuteness, was now being not photographed just as often as anyone else. Our swim meets, science fair projects, holiday dinners, and dirtbike wheelies continued undocumented. It’s fair to say that the Holt children were not unduly fetishized.

Believe me, I tried even then to be magnanimous about this parental indifference, this inability to see the obvious star quality in their children and paparazzi accordingly. The lawn needed mowing, the Weather Channel needed watching, someone had to turn off the porch light. Who has time to take photos of brain-damaged kids, skating and trampolining, much less playacting in their fright wigs and clown shoes on Halloween?

And I might have maintained some empathy for Ma and Pa Holt in this regard had I not rediscovered another classic set of Polaroids from the family album. Incriminating photos, which I enter as Exhibit F. Let the record show that our parents once attended a party at the neighbors’ house some wild weekend long ago, where many glossy snapshots were taken to preserve the festivities. A costume party. A bacchanal which my mother and father attended dressed as Raggedy Ann and Andy. Spectacular photos. Glorious color.

Not that it upsets me. But I do sometimes wish I’d kept that baseball bat.

No matter. My self-sufficiency was inflamed in my teens as my foster parent, the Instamatic, led me on a quest for artistic expansion. Along with my friend Gnat, who was equally eager to spend time away from home, I organized surrealist photoshoots throughout the neighborhood. I photographed Gnat playing matador with highway traffic, getting steamrolled by LP records via forced perspective, and, through the magic of scissors and tape, shaking hands with himself. All captured in grainy, low-contrast, Instamatic haze, poetically documenting the teenage lives of two outcast conceptual artists who will never have girlfriends. We even, I shudder to recall, took photos of each other in homemade sci-fi monster outfits and dressed as punk rock performers we invented. Cuz who else was gonna?

Returning to Gnat’s house one day to touch up our wigs, he promised to show me something grotesque while we had the place to ourselves. “The Exhibit,” he said as he led me into what was supposed to be a spare bedroom at the end of the hall. Here was contained his mother’s vast collection of photos of her new toddler granddaughters. The entire room was devoted to these portraits, framed and displayed on the walls, shelves, and side tables, as well as loose shots stacked high on the floor, the bed, and spilling from the closet. All photos of the little angels in frilly outfits, their hair professionally coiffed, at dance class, lounging poolside, having pony rides, at church picnics, in ice cream parlors, at Disney World, etc. Every possible moment photographed.

The only other thing in the room, as I recall, was a library of three dozen retail VHS cassettes – a complete set, I assumed – of Shirley Temple movies.

- A.H.

(And let’s not forget Ashley’s website, jam-packed with portraits and other drawings, his highly-affordable prints and books currently available, his eagerness for your portrait commission, and his contact email, thrdgll@gmail.com, where he longs to hear from you.)

1. Dropped me off at the movies – let’s be clear. Because those were the days when a mother could simply ask the clerk to let her kids into Black Sunday unaccompanied while she went to the liquor store.

2. Even into the new century, with home photography at its most refined, family members of that generation still expected shots of the kids in their Easter dresses to be taken in the yard, next to the AC unit, as if indoor picturemaking were still an impossibility.

3. I can tell you from my own employment experience that household use is the chief function of nearly all government-issued equipment.

4. “Our Vietnam,” they later claimed.