Aunt Sophie was an artist who thought the human body was just another thing to paint, draw, sculpt or photograph. She spent several days with me developing a portfolio of simple photos taken with my simple Ansco Flash Clipper and later a borrowed 35mm pre-war Leica III-C which I still have in my XXth Century Camera Collection. I’ve airbrushed a few of my photos of her and my other aunts, so I could share them here. If I’m wrong, I’ll take them down.
Aunt Sophie was very sophisticated. She’d been on the Continental Tour after finishing school, and she loved opera, theater, ballet and painting.
Uncle Morris wore that fake Captain’s cap; he’d bought it on a trip to Martha’s Vineyard at one of those sucker-type souvenir shops on the marina docks. He always brought back some sort of junk whenever he traveled, and Aunt Sophie would find ways of stuffing the things into the attic — he refused to give them up once he owned them, a sure sign of being off his meds and yes, we had meds in them days, mostly Miltown, an early tranquilizer.
I don’t know what it was about Aunt Sophie, but it was never boring to be around her — you never knew what she was likely to do, and like Cousin Audrey, IMPULSIVE was her middle name.
I guess Aunt Sophie would today be called a Liberated Woman. She pretty much did what she wanted to do, and when she was in her late 50s, she started working out as a standup, and she was really, really funny, ‘way ahead of her time, and could have been a Brett Butler type, had she been born a few years later.
In all, I’m glad I had the experience before I got into the field as a professional. These casual snapshots made it so much easier for me to work with models later on, to understand how to get the best out of each shot, and to make every shot count — something we might tend to ignore in this age of video photography, because people no longer want to learn how to time a shot or how to “tease” a good shot out of a model.
Of course, when it comes to natural models like Tiffany, Charlie and Amy, there’s no need to coax anything — it’s right there every time!
In case you think anything was going on between my aunt and myself, you haven’t been paying attention. I wasn’t pretending to be a boy at that time. Why bother to get into male drag or whatever when it’s summertime??? Only when I enrolled in school was I dressed like a boy, especially military school, and no, they never found out, and nobody ever caught wise.
I had to be tricky with the showers and such, but it worked out perfectly for decades because of my snarky deep male type voice, which I’ve never tried to change — it makes my comedy routines a hell of a lot funnier to hear my voice coming out of a female form.
See You At The Top!!!
LeslieAnn