{"id":6549,"date":"2013-04-18T08:00:45","date_gmt":"2013-04-18T12:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=6549"},"modified":"2013-04-17T14:44:01","modified_gmt":"2013-04-17T18:44:01","slug":"process-profile-esther-lee-discusses-daughters-of-celluloid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2013\/04\/18\/process-profile-esther-lee-discusses-daughters-of-celluloid\/","title":{"rendered":"Process Profile: Esther Lee Discusses DAUGHTERS OF CELLULOID"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_6551\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6551\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption alignleft\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/BreakfastingwithMichael.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-6551\" alt=\"Esther Lee\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/BreakfastingwithMichael-300x300.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/BreakfastingwithMichael-300x300.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/BreakfastingwithMichael-150x150.jpg 150w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/BreakfastingwithMichael.jpg 800w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-6551\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Esther Lee<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><em>Esther Lee has written <\/em><a title=\"Esther Lee's SPIT at SPD\" href=\"http:\/\/www.spdbooks.org\/Producte\/9781932418392\/spit.aspx\" target=\"_blank\">Spit<\/a><em>, a poetry collection selected for the Elixir Press Poetry Prize (2011) and her chapbook, <\/em>The Blank Missives<em> (Trafficker Press, 2007). Her poems and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in <\/em>Lantern Review, Ploughshares, Verse Daily, Salt Hill, Good Foot, Swink, Hyphen, Born Magazine<em>, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Indiana University where she served as Editor-in-Chief for <\/em>Indiana Review<em>. She has been awarded the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize and Utah Writer\u2019s Contest Award for Poetry selected by Brenda Shaughnessy, as well as having been twice nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Ruth Lilly Fellowship, and AWP Intro Journals Project. Currently, she pursues a Ph.D. in Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Utah and lives with her fianc\u00e9, Michael, and their dog and three cats in Salt Lake. Starting this fall, she will begin teaching as an assistant professor at Agnes Scott College.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong><em>This April, we are returning to our Process Profiles series, in which contemporary Asian American poets discuss their craft, focusing on their writing process for an individual poem or poetic sequence of theirs<\/em><\/strong><strong><em>. As in the past, we\u2019ve asked <\/em><\/strong><strong>Lantern Review\u00a0<\/strong><em><strong>contributors to discuss\u00a0<\/strong><\/em><strong><em>their process for composing a piece of theirs that we\u2019ve published. In this installment, Esther Lee reflects upon the <a title=\"Excerpt of DAUGHTERS OF CELLULOID, LR Issue 5\" href=\"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/issue5\/11_12.html\" target=\"_blank\">excerpt of her project <\/a><\/em><a title=\"Excerpt of DAUGHTERS OF CELLULOID, LR Issue 5\" href=\"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/issue5\/11_12.html\" target=\"_blank\">Daughters of Celluloid<\/a> <em>that appeared in <a title=\"LR Issue 5\" href=\"http:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/issue5\/\" target=\"_blank\">Issue 5<\/a>.<\/em><br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>(if his plate would not record the clouds, he could point his camera down and eliminate the sky)<\/p>\n<p>\u2014John Szarkowski<\/p>\n<p>If there is a hegemonic familial gaze, imposing rigid familial ideologies, then mothers are most cruelly subjected to its scrutiny.<\/p>\n<p>\u2014Marianne Hirsch<\/p>\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Hands.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-6556\" style=\"border-width: 0; border-style: none;\" alt=\"Hands\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Hands-300x245.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"245\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Hands-300x245.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Hands-1024x839.jpg 1024w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Hands.jpg 1331w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>Excerpts of this Process Profile are pulled from a craft talk titled, \u201cDouble Exposures: Photographic Fictions and Traumatic Memories\u201d given at Virginia Tech. All photographic images are ones I\u2019ve taken or borrowed from family albums.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>My hope is to invite you into a constellation of influences\u2014and mostly questions\u2014I\u2019m working with and exploring in this work-in-progress, tentatively titled <em>Daughters of Celluloid<\/em>. This constellation includes the works of writers and artists who meditate on, thematize, and\/or employ photography, as well as those whose works investigate the complexities of trauma and representations, in particular, of trauma not directly experienced first-hand. So a kind of assemblage, if you will, one that is part wax, part string, part etched glass.<\/p>\n<p>In <em>Daughters of Celluloid<\/em>, the narrator finds that her mother\u2019s enigmatic past is pocked with speech, presented as fragmented anecdotes, suggesting recessed narratives of trauma and dislocation. To borrow a phrase from the French novelist and Holocaust writer, Henri Raczymow, memory is \u201cshot through with holes\u201d and underscored by potential absences of family photographs wherein large swaths of time and space have seemingly vanished, losing any semblance of continuity. As a result, the narrator finds herself attempting to photograph the mother, grappling with how the camera can both fix and unfix them. In doing so, they disrupt their unspoken ways of looking, complicating the myths of familial memory and, ultimately, searching for what Alison Bechdel describes in her graphic novel,<em> Are You My Mother?<\/em>, as a \u201cmutual cathexis\u201d between mother and daughter, wherein they can recognize each other\u2019s invisible wounds.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><!--more-->*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/MomandWinterTree.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-6573\" style=\"border-width: 0; border-style: none;\" alt=\"MomandWinterTree\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/MomandWinterTree.jpg\" width=\"460\" height=\"410\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/MomandWinterTree.jpg 575w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/MomandWinterTree-300x267.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 460px) 100vw, 460px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>WAX.<\/p>\n<p>What I know about this photograph:<\/p>\n<p>This is my mother. Or an image of her. Though she is questionably small. Though her face is a blurred coin without face or denomination. I tell myself that this is my mother. That I belong to her.<\/p>\n<p>If you squint, my mother appears to be an extension of the tree. Or the tree an extension of her. Either of which: an aberration of the other. I\u2019m unsure how far the shadow extends.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">My own vision is terrible, especially my left eye. As a child I was encouraged by a well-meaning optometrist to read with a cutout piece of newspaper taped over the left side of my eyeglasses. All in the hopes of correcting my vision. Eventually, I ripped it off.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>STRING.<\/p>\n<p>Barthes\u2019s <em>Camera Lucida<\/em> is perhaps (next to my fianc\u00e9) the love of my life\u2014the book, that is, not Barthes himself, although I should re-examine this possibility too.<\/p>\n<p>In the aftermath of his mother\u2019s death, Barthes searches though photographs of her, photographs that would, as he puts it, \u201cspeak\u201d and allow him the hope of \u201cfinding\u201d his mother again.<\/p>\n<p>He writes:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>I never recognized her except in fragments, which is to say that I missed her being, and that therefore I missed her altogether. It was not she, and yet it was no one else. . . . Photography thereby compelled me to perform a painful\u00a0 labor; straining toward the essence of her identity, I was struggling among images partially true, and therefore totally false (65-66).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/MomandWinterTree_MedShot.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignleft size-medium wp-image-6576\" style=\"border-width: 0; border-style: none;\" alt=\"MomandWinterTree_MedShot\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/MomandWinterTree_MedShot-163x300.jpg\" width=\"163\" height=\"300\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/MomandWinterTree_MedShot-163x300.jpg 163w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/MomandWinterTree_MedShot.jpg 327w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 163px) 100vw, 163px\" \/><\/a>\u201cImages partially true . . .\u201d<\/p>\n<p>A few pages later, Barthes describes a photograph of his mother as a child. She is standing with her brother at the end of the little wooden bridge in a glassed-in conservatory. This \u201cWinter Garden photograph,\u201d as he refers to it, is the photograph which allows him to feel that he has \u201cat last rediscovered [his] mother\u201d (69).<\/p>\n<p>Unlike Barthes, however, I\u2019m unsure of what a photograph of my own mother as child would look like since there are none in our family albums. Instead, photographs of my mother begin mid-sentence, mid-narrative, in her thirties, as if her infancy and adolescence had somehow never occurred.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>GLASS.<\/p>\n<p>There are too many photographers from whom I draw inspiration to name here, but I\u2019d like to highlight a few below.<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Nikki S. Lee\" href=\"http:\/\/www.tonkonow.com\/lee.html\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Nikki S. Lee<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Like a social anthropologist or a driven method actor, Lee observes particular American subcultures and ethnic groups\u2014such as punks, yuppies, skateboarders and swing dancers\u2014and adopts their customs and costumes through gesture and posture. In her \u201cProjects\u201d series, she immerses herself in the respective lifestyles of these groups, a process that sometimes takes weeks or even months, which involve performing and posing in snapshot photographs, doing basically whatever it takes to \u201cfit in.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Her ability to \u201cperform\u201d cultural identities in these photos suggests that identity is not a static set of traits belonging to an individual, but, rather, something constantly changing and re-defined through relationships with other people. She\u2019s been described, not surprisingly, as a chameleon. Her work often unnerves viewers because of its ability to provoke questions of authenticity and sincerity, sometimes revealing our own assumptions and stereotypes about cultural identities.<\/p>\n<p>Lee\u2019s work informs my own attempt to consider the ways our identities can be reconstituted, how identity can be an arena of free play, where appearance may serve only as an alterable mask. In my own work, markers of ethnicity and race are destabilized. For instance, the mother character purposefully thickens her Korean accent to avoid receiving a speeding ticket. Moments when ethnic markers are acknowledged\u2014and are in danger of aesthetically commodifying Asian American cultural differences\u2014attempt to give way to other moments that obscure and discomfort those conventional boundaries and subjectivities.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLee_WinterTreeCloseup.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-6584\" style=\"border-width: 0; border-style: none;\" alt=\"EstherLee_WinterTreeCloseup\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLee_WinterTreeCloseup.jpg\" width=\"342\" height=\"293\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLee_WinterTreeCloseup.jpg 342w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLee_WinterTreeCloseup-300x257.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 342px) 100vw, 342px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>WAX.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><a title=\"Bertien van Manen\" href=\"http:\/\/www.bertienvanmanen.nl\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Bertien van Manen<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Bertien van Manen is a Dutch photographer who has traveled extensively in Eastern Europe and Asia, often learning the native languages and developing bonds with people she has photographed. In one series, she took photos of people\u2019s photographs instead of photographing the people themselves. In a video about her work, she mentions that when she\u2019d visit people\u2019s houses, they\u2019d ask her, \u201cWhere do you want me?\u201d and she would respond with, \u201cI don\u2019t want you. I want your pictures.\u201d At times van Manen would arrange the photos in the person\u2019s home, juxtaposing the photo with a particular object belonging to the person who lived there. Her photos often suggest the impact of larger cultural memories\u2014at times those memories have alluded to traumatic events such as the Holocaust or other upheavals\u2014on personal, private lives.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Her photographs speak to my own interest in photographs as cultural objects loaded with meaning and ideologies. I\u2019m interested in portraiture via photographing of spaces (both with or without photographs in them) and what these spaces could illuminate about a person, perhaps as much\u2014if not more so\u2014than a conventional portrait of their face.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_6580\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6580\" style=\"width: 357px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLee_BRBible.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-6580 \" style=\"border-width: 0; border-style: none;\" alt=\"This photograph here is of my parent\u2019s bathroom. If you look closely, you\u2019ll see a metal basket attached to the wall and inside\u2014a bible and a wooden back scratcher.\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLee_BRBible.jpg\" width=\"357\" height=\"444\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLee_BRBible.jpg 357w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLee_BRBible-241x300.jpg 241w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 357px) 100vw, 357px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-6580\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">This photograph here is of my parents&#8217; bathroom. If you look closely, you\u2019ll see a metal basket attached to the wall and inside\u2014a bible and a wooden back scratcher.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p><em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>STRING.<\/p>\n<p><strong><a title=\"Nan Goldin\" href=\"http:\/\/www.moma.org\/collection\/artist.php?artist_id=7532\" target=\"_blank\">Nan Goldin<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n<p>The American photographer, Nan Goldin, says that, when she was a kid, people would tell her that \u201cYou didn\u2019t see that, that didn\u2019t happen,\u201d so they\u2019d tell her what she\u2019d experienced for her (instead of believing her perception of reality). As a result, she became skeptical of other people\u2019s versions of reality and started taking photos. She says, \u201cIt was all about keeping myself alive . . . about being able to trust my own experience . . . I still use the camera as a tool of anti-revisionism.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>We can see just how urgent such a statement is when it comes to one of Goldin\u2019s most memorable photographs&#8217; title, <em>Nan one month after being battered (1984)<\/em>. In using the camera as a tool of anti-revisionism, Goldin suggests that this photograph of her bruised face following a beating from a former lover possesses a documentary authority that she can\u2019t (and doesn\u2019t want to) deny, evidence that prevents her (as she suggests) from ultimately returning to an abusive relationship.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Her compelling statement, however, provokes one of the major questions I\u2019m exploring in <em>Daughters of Celluloid<\/em>, which is whether photography may offer a way to actively revise the past, potentially bringing to light how we are constituted in the space of social configurations like family. For instance, how do we look at, see, scrutinize, survey, and monitor within the institutions of family? What happens to the family\u2019s visual interactions when the coded nature of family photos are manipulated, purposefully distorted, or re-enacted?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeMomatWhiteHouse.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-6590\" style=\"border-width: 0; border-style: none;\" alt=\"EstherLeeMomatWhiteHouse\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeMomatWhiteHouse.jpg\" width=\"368\" height=\"386\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeMomatWhiteHouse.jpg 575w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeMomatWhiteHouse-286x300.jpg 286w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 368px) 100vw, 368px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>GLASS.<\/p>\n<p><a title=\"Sally Mann\" href=\"http:\/\/www.sallymann.com\" target=\"_blank\"><strong>Sally Mann<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Sally Mann\u2019s controversial photographs of her children (exhibited in 1992 and later published as a book titled, <em>Immediate Family<\/em>, in 1995) explore familial bonds, as well as maternal love and child response. The photographs of Mann\u2019s children seem to meditate on the concept of childhood and \u201cgrowing up\u201d using a variety of the sensual, the everyday, and the fantastic; all through a maternal eye.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s important to note that plenty of critics have argued that this body of work evokes cultural anxieties. Mann emphasizes, however, that she herself didn\u2019t intentionally seek to provoke those anxieties. She states that these photographs are simply \u201cof my children living their lives here too. Many of these pictures are intimate, some are fictions and some are fantastic, but most are of ordinary things that every mother has seen.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>With regard to Mann\u2019s work, I\u2019m most interested in how her photographs ride the line between the particular and universal, between fiction and authentic experience, while not shying away from the nostalgic or the taboo. Her work also incorporates a sense of performance in that she at times stages elaborate portraits that still lie within the realm of possibility, at times re-creating actual events.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">For instance, in the case of her photograph, \u201cJessie Bites,\u201d Mann explains in the documentary, <em>What Remains<\/em>, that her daughter Jessie had bitten her, but by the time the photograph was ready to be taken, the bite mark had all but disappeared. As a result, Mann recreate<span style=\"color: #ff0000;\">d<\/span> the scenario by creating the bite mark on her arm herself.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeNegatives.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-6587\" style=\"border-width: 0; border-style: none;\" alt=\"EstherLeeNegatives\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeNegatives.jpg\" width=\"555\" height=\"263\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeNegatives.jpg 555w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeNegatives-300x142.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 555px) 100vw, 555px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>WAX.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left;\">Here is a close-up of the word \u201csalang\u201d in Korean, which means \u201clove.\u201d This is lifted from a letter written by my mother.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Salang.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-6603\" style=\"border-width: 0; border-style: none;\" alt=\"Salang\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Salang.jpg\" width=\"460\" height=\"284\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Salang.jpg 575w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Salang-300x185.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 460px) 100vw, 460px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>And here, an even closer view of the syllable, \u201clang.\u201d To consider my mother\u2019s handwriting and ironic notions about the ways we look at and scrutinize each other, I created a letterpress broadside, which centers around this second syllable, \u201clang.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Salang2.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-6604\" style=\"border-width: 0; border-style: none;\" alt=\"Salang2\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Salang2.jpg\" width=\"460\" height=\"416\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Salang2.jpg 575w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/Salang2-300x271.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 460px) 100vw, 460px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/MomandWinterTree.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter  wp-image-6573\" style=\"border-width: 0; border-style: none;\" alt=\"MomandWinterTree\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/MomandWinterTree.jpg\" width=\"460\" height=\"410\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/MomandWinterTree.jpg 575w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/MomandWinterTree-300x267.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 460px) 100vw, 460px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>STRING.<\/p>\n<p>The window\u2014heightening my awareness of her torso\u2014threatens to weigh down her shoulders, to startle her. On the other hand, the window (it could be a helpful window!) might serve as her thought bubble. Though what is visible is the bubble and not her thoughts.<\/p>\n<p>What is disconcerting is how the tree in the background horizontally distends, that perhaps I inadvertently (and digitally) stretched its branches\u2014and the framed world\u2014apart. I feel guilty but don\u2019t correct it.<\/p>\n<p>I don\u2019t understand why everything is so magenta. Perhaps I am to blame for this too.<\/p>\n<p>The house behind her is not ours.<\/p>\n<p>The boy\u2019s face I cropped out may belong to one of the children my mother took care of. This may be their house. The trees suggest an affiliation between them.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>GLASS.<\/p>\n<p>Lyrics from Bill Callahan\u2019s song, \u201cNight\u201d:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We do not know how things work<\/p>\n<p>We do not know where you go<\/p>\n<p>In the night<\/p>\n<p>. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .<\/p>\n<p>We do not know<\/p>\n<p>The door that holds you<\/p>\n<p>Silent as glue<\/p>\n<p>We stand under it<\/p>\n<p>But we don&#8217;t understand it<\/p>\n<p>We stand under it<\/p>\n<p>But we don&#8217;t understand it<\/p>\n<p>The door that holds you<\/p>\n<p>Silent as glue<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>These lyrics evoke my own sense as a child of a palpable silence within my family. At times these silences seemingly culminated in overt physical violence and in other ways, symbolic and subtle. Henri Raczymow writes, \u201cThe unsaid, the untransmitted, the silence about the past, were themselves eloquent,\u201d and yet \u201cfragments have been transmitted . . . a trace remains.\u201d My parents were children during the Korean War. What they had experienced during that time has been offered in slivers, alluded to or mentioned as fragments during conversation.<\/p>\n<p>My parents\u2019 testimony, if you will, arrives, sparse, out of context\u2014like slips of paper, creased against the grain, waterlogged, and baring cryptic scrawl. A curse? A folded love note? As Jeanette Winterson said during a recent reading, \u201cThe words are the parts of silence that can be spoken.\u201d Familial legacy: itself both gift and debt. <em>We stand under it, but we don\u2019t understand it. Silent as glue.<\/em><\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">\u00a0*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>WAX.<\/p>\n<p>In<em> Immigrant Acts<\/em>, scholar Lisa Lowe votes for\u00a0what she calls a \u201chorizontal generational model of culture\u201d in which cultural identity is constantly in flux, never complete, and considered in relation to history and power, rather than the vertical anthropological model wherein cultural identity is fixed and related to some essentialized past. For Lowe, interpreting Asian American culture exclusively in terms of the master narratives of generational conflict and filial relation essentializes Asian American culture, obscuring the particularities and incommensurabilities of class, gender, and national diversities among those of Asian descent.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeePhoneBooth.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-6613\" style=\"border-width: 0; border-style: none;\" alt=\"EstherLeePhoneBooth\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeePhoneBooth.jpg\" width=\"524\" height=\"216\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeePhoneBooth.jpg 524w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeePhoneBooth-300x123.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 524px) 100vw, 524px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In <em>Daughters of Celluloid<\/em>, however, rather than to opt solely for this horizontal model as Lowe recommends, I attempt to revisit and possibly rearticulate this vertical model of first\/second-generation struggles, wondering how\/if the portrayal of these generational conflicts and filial relations can avoid the former representational pitfalls of reducing social differences into a solely privatized familial opposition. How might this text celebrate a paradigm based more on heterogeneity, hybridity, and multiplicity, revealing how the making of Asian American culture includes practices that are partly inherited, partly modified, as well as partly invented? In other words: part wax, part string, part etched glass. And, more broadly, how can writers of color potentially avoid re-inscribing the very demarcations they admonish and find reductive, yet celebrate and foster the sense of alliance and empowerment that collective identity constructs can spark?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeMirrorCalendar.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"alignright size-medium wp-image-6616\" style=\"border-width: 0; border-style: none;\" alt=\"EstherLeeMirrorCalendar\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeMirrorCalendar-300x201.jpg\" width=\"300\" height=\"201\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeMirrorCalendar-300x201.jpg 300w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeMirrorCalendar.jpg 500w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a>STRING.<\/p>\n<p>Understandably, there are conflicting theories about the notion of an \u201cintergenerational transmission of trauma\u201d\u2014from whether or not trauma can actually be \u201ctransmitted\u201d (and to what extent), to questions of how to even refer to the children or their parents who have survived trauma.<\/p>\n<p>While my aim in <em>Daughters of Celluloid<\/em> is to not necessarily align with a particular viewpoint (at least not wholesale), instead I wish to explore the complications of varying viewpoints (at least in sections of this work and in oblique ways) and put them in dialogue with one another in this manuscript.<\/p>\n<p>Take for instance, Kaethe Weingarten\u2019s investigations about how the trauma of political violence experienced in one generation may \u201cpass\u201d to another generation that did not directly experience it. This \u201cintergenerational transmission of trauma,\u201d according to Weingarten, may result in what she calls \u201csecondary\u201d or \u201cvicarious traumatization.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Ernst van Alphen, on the other hand, in his article, \u201cSecond-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory,\u201d questions the alleged continuity of trauma between generations, which is implied by such terms as \u201csecond generation.\u201d He writes, \u201cit makes little sense to speak of the transmission of trauma. Children of survivors can be traumatized, but their trauma does not consist of the Holocaust experience, not even in indirect or mitigated form. Their trauma is caused by being raised by a traumatized Holocaust survivor.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In her book <em>Family Frames<\/em>, Marianne Hirsch describes what she refers to as \u201cpost-memory,\u201d which \u201ccharacterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Along with the ways in which trauma is potentially suppressed or \u201ctransmitted\u201d through verbal and non-verbal, symbolic means, I\u2019m interested in exploring those seemingly invisible networks of looking, concentrating on a single family and the role of their family photos as a form of imagetext that mediates individual and familial memory.<\/p>\n<p>Bertien van Manen\u2019s work also relates to what Marianne Hirsch refers to as the \u201cunconscious optics\u201d of familial memory by provoking us to question the ways in which we are constituted in the space of family through looking, how power is deployed or contested. Through narratives mediated by the daughter in <em>Daughters of Celluloid<\/em>, an unreliable transcriptionist\/archivist of both her personal and familial histories, how might concealed optical relations resurface and become acknowledgeable? How are traumatic events potentially negotiated, framed, and reframed?<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeMedicine.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-6623\" style=\"border-width: 0; border-style: none;\" alt=\"EstherLeeMedicine\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeMedicine.jpg\" width=\"590\" height=\"390\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeMedicine.jpg 590w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeeMedicine-300x198.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 590px) 100vw, 590px\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>GLASS.<\/p>\n<p>To explore the tension between the use of the camera as an anti-revisionist tool (as seen in Goldin\u2019s work), as well as the possibilities of photography as a revisionist tool (as suggested by works by Cindy Sherman and Nikki S. Lee), or more broadly, the tension between what is potentially decidable and undecideable with regard to individual and collective memory, a kind of \u2018double exposure\u2019 is evoked. In a sense, a superimposition of both familial inheritance and political trauma, of both gift and debt, of remembering and forgetting, of the dual impulse to both fictionalize and to document. In a later section of <em>Daughters of Celluloid<\/em>, the daughter and mother characters broach new territory in their visual interactions. Through the re-enactment of former events, they intervene by \u201cperforming\u201d photos, thereby \u201cunfixing\u201d their former meanings, which may allow for new ways of seeing each other.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\">*\u00a0 *\u00a0 *<\/p>\n<p>WAX.<\/p>\n<p>Often, photographs, for me, suggest silences. Visual reminders of the very factors that help create an archive of elisions. Even the backsides of certain photographs (as this one below from a family album) are also emblematic and resemble that which shapes our own sense of belonging: maps, eruptions, frames, chromosomes, fingerprints, signatures\u2014presences both inscrutable yet familiar. How to make sense of what Nadine Fresco calls a \u201cdiaspora of ashes\u201d? Perhaps this is why I search for and collect old photographs from antiques malls, thrift stores, yard sales. And at the risk of committing what Susan Sontag would consider a dangerous collecting of the world, I love to stare at these familiar and anonymous faces in photographs, whether they belong to my own family or someone else\u2019s.<\/p>\n<p>Much of what fascinates me most about these artists I\u2019ve mentioned (and others like Philip Lorca di Corcia, Sophie Calle, Duane Michals, etc.) is how their work at times problematizes two (arguably) divergent modes of photography\u2014as a possible realm of fiction and duplicity, as well as a medium devoted to authenticity of someone\u2019s perceptions and experiences.<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_6625\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-6625\" style=\"width: 460px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeePhotoBacks.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\" wp-image-6625 \" alt=\"A different photo, of which I cannot find, is that of my mother rowing a small boat on what appears to be a small pond. I think I remember the edges of the pond in the frame, which, along with her human scale for reference, detracts slightly (but only slightly) from the possibility of reading a narrative akin to an epic. But if you were to crop in, though (or take away the pond altogether), you might see her as I do, that in spite of herself, she is rowing away and toward something else. I once created a sculptural version of this photograph, my mother and the boat larger than life size, but the photograph and the sculpture are both gone. Don\u2019t remember where.\" src=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeePhotoBacks.jpg\" width=\"460\" height=\"350\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeePhotoBacks.jpg 575w, https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/04\/EstherLeePhotoBacks-300x228.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 460px) 100vw, 460px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-6625\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">A different photo, which I cannot find, is that of my mother rowing a small boat on what appears to be a small pond. I think I remember the edges of the pond in the frame, which, along with her human scale for reference, detracts slightly (but only slightly) from the possibility of reading a narrative akin to an epic. But if you were to crop in, though (or take away the pond altogether), you might see her as I do, that in spite of herself, she is rowing away and toward something else. I once created a sculptural version of this photograph, my mother and the boat larger than life size, but the photograph and the sculpture are both gone. Don\u2019t remember where.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Esther Lee has written Spit, a poetry collection selected for the Elixir Press Poetry Prize (2011) and her chapbook, The Blank Missives (Trafficker Press, 2007). Her poems and articles have appeared or are forthcoming in Lantern Review, Ploughshares, Verse Daily, Salt Hill, Good Foot, Swink, Hyphen, Born Magazine, and elsewhere. A Kundiman fellow, she received [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[318],"tags":[353,959,624,861,274,1051],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6549"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6549"}],"version-history":[{"count":67,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6549\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6634,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6549\/revisions\/6634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6549"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6549"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6549"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}