Ottie's Picture Book
Photographs from the book IN by Ottie, now age 10
These photographs are pulled from the 2024 art book co-authored with Benjamin Donaldson and Lisa Kereszi, titled, IN, published by Roman Nvmerals in New York.
The images in the experimental, co-authored book were made with a variety of cameras by two parents and one child in, around, and near their home from early 2020 through the end of 2021, the most locked-down period of the pandemic. The father made pictures that are staged, magical and strange, looking for mystery and joy in the repetitive life of a small family huddled in from the storm. The child made pictures with a point-and-shoot of her life – her dolls, her toys, the blurry world from a car window on drives in circles, and her screens, which expressed her inner life of being a child alone. The mother did what mothers traditionally are thought to do – cooked and gardened, and made pictures exclusively with her iPhone, of food and flowers, and arranged them chronologically to document and foretell the passing, cyclical seasons. The pictures by the trio were all tossed together, and each author could only be identified in an almost-hidden key at the end of the book, Highlights Magazine-style – upside down and in a tiny font. At some point it becomes unclear whose pictures are whose, which adds to the confusion and displacement in the book, and which reflects the collective experience of that Groundhog Day-like year we all experienced.
The parents taught online, and the daughter learned to read and write and add and subtract on the computer. Ottie started the year age 5 in Kindergarten, pivoted to asynchrous learning online, turned 6, stayed home for first grade, which was both live and recorded, turned 7, then went back to school in person for the last two months of the school year. She socialized with other kids only online – in Zoom camps, in workshops on subjects like storytelling and comedy, in classes on topics like Hawaii and megalodons, and sometimes one-on-one for Facetime playdates. She obsessively drew during classes, making elaborate houses, with many rooms, over and over again. She produced a little book every day for Kindergarten – drawing the illustrations and writing her letters, often backwards, in invented spellings, on construction paper that she bound together with copious amounts of Scotch tape. Occasionally she taped in photographs and Polaroids, but she frequently would grab her camera when she wanted to record something on her own, often a “set-up” that she knew wouldn’t stay that way, or a meal that was about to be eaten. Years later, her picture-making impulses remain the same. Her camera was always charged and made available, and she took hundreds of pictures.
The title she wished for her book was “Ottie’s Picture Book,” and an early draft of IN was borne out of her parent’s original edit for the print-on-demand book they had printed. The book she wished for would probably contain many of the same pictures – of her toys, her onscreen friends from her learning apps, of her parents as she saw them. Here are some of her pictures, pulled out from the family’s collective description of that year, and sequenced by her parents, paying close attention to the way that she looks at her companions – be they her parents or her dolls or onscreen characters. Time and space melts from one picture to the next, and there is a feeling of the family being the only people in the world, on an island, or a ship, away from what they feared might harm them.
-Lisa Kereszi, 2024
Artist’s Statement
People called it a lockdown? Were we really locked-in, though?! Eat, sleep, repeat. We stayed home. We did nothing but stay home and eat, sleep and repeat and watch videos. My memories from that year are good. Mostly good. Good, good, good. Homeschool! And that time makes me think of breakfast. Because I remember a lot of eating breakfast.
-Ottie, 2024
Click on the images below to make them bigger.
Credits
Girl Museum would like to thank Lisa Kereszi, Ottie, and their family for sharing this work with us. We are grateful for being able to bring this unique show and persepctive to our audience.