max s. gerber(the latest shot)

it seems my mother has appointed me the unofficial, implied future custodian of the photo archives of the family. there really is nothing more sacred to her than the giant stash of photos overflowing a box in her living room. most days when i visit my mother i return home with envelopes full of things. newspaper clippings, usually – she loves newspaper clippings – but sometimes the envelopes are full of really amazing things.

last week i returned with two envelopes older than myself. they were full of negatives by mary ellen mark.

in the spring of 1972, a year before i was born, mary ellen pitched a story to life magazine on my mother. at the time my mother was managing carly simon and diane keaton. she had recently left her post as the first female executive at playboy. she was in charge of booking entertainment for all the playboy clubs across the country. during this time, she tells me, oscar peterson taught her about jazz, and she briefly dated gerry mulligan. apparently i was very nearly the child of mort sahl instead of bill gerber.

for one reason or another, as so often happens in magazines, even almost forty years ago, the story never ran. for one reason or another, my mother ended up with two big envelopes of negatives shot by mary ellen mark. negatives in yellowed old sleeves, with no proof sheets attached, just a log sheet from the photo department at LIFE magazine, a small piece of photo history itself. yellowed, old envelopes of the history of my family. i don’t know why or how these negatives ended up in my mother’s possession rather than in mary ellen’s archives. i keep meaning to ask her, but somehow always forget.

i’ve been looking at this collection of old negatives, angry at myself for trading away my darkroom years ago. the sleeves are so yellowed it’s hard to make out what’s on the film without removing it, and even though i’ve handled countless thousands of bare negatives over the last fifteen years these somehow seem different. like i don’t want to disturb them, maybe. it feels like even though they’ve been sitting in a filing cabinet in my parent’s house for more than thirty years they somehow don’t – or shouldn’t – belong to me.