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.
My shadow
A picture of me taking a picture of my shadow, but it’s not exactly me, because it’s my shadow.
Emerson in the car
I took a picture of my doll Emerson looking out the window at Christmas lights. But we weren’t there yet, and I brought her to see the lights, too.
My mom covered with dolls
I took pictures of you guys, too, when you were making funny poses and wearing funny clothes. I remember I think we had to take a picture of something for school – we had to dress up someone in our family like that.
The baby doll called Henry
I like the tongue the most in this picture.
My toe
I put my foot out, then my hand right near it, and took the picture. I took it because it’s funny.
Mom on the slide
This is my mom falling down the slide, and she was posing for me. We got it during Covid. When we were building it, I saw a dog tick on the wood. It looked strange in the truck when they drove it up; it didn’t look like a playhouse yet. My daddy put it together.
Night driving
This is I think one time around Christmastime, when we were driving to see the lights. Emerson was there, too, she was probably sitting there, The red thing is a weird thing in the sky. I don’t know exactly what it is. We were driving, that’s why everything was swerved. The lights on the left are how I know it was around Christmas, because I think those are Christmas lights.
Owl flying
In this one we had an app that we did for schoolwork, and this is a picture from it. At the end of each of the games in it, there would be a surprise video, and the owls were one of them. I did it on my iPad at home, but we also did it at school when I went back. I learned a little bit of reading this way. This is one owl, but it looks like two owls; it’s between frames. (My mom wrote the last line.)
Dad with pterodactyl
This is my dad. We were playing in the plastic pool, and we had this floatie. It was a pterodactyl, my favorite dinosaur. And he was flying it into the pool here. And I think we found a dinosaur once. On the beach. A dinosaur toy. I also remember the chickens at the farm. I fed them grass and things, and one of them would jump up to get the food when I held it really high. And I remember sleeping, no – eating, actually. I remember eating food. Bread with butter on it. And pasta, the long pasta. And Daddy made sushi. It was really good, it is really good. He’d put dance music on and say, “Stay away from the knife, Ottie!”
Furry friends
It was a show that I used to watch, but it got deleted from Netflix, and I don’t know how to watch it anymore. This is a picture I took from it on my iPad screen.
Christmas decorations
I remember driving through lights – Christmas lights. This is actually on the same trip as the one of Emerson and the swerved one. This is a picture of when we were going past a house, and they were just blowing up their decorations, because they only blow up at night.
Airport at night
This might be from the same car drive as the last one, but I’m not sure. We were driving past an airport. I have never been on a plane, though. I would like to go to Japan on a plane. I want to try the food, see the places and everything. But let’s talk more about the photo. So the reflection here in the middle of the light inside the top of the car, which I had on, because I was taking pictures. But my mom says that it was a Keep Out sign on the chain link fence. But I don’t think so; that’s obviously not true.
Words on the screen
This is also from that learning app, from a different game. I took a picture right when I had clicked on the right now. You had to pick which word matched what the picture was at the top, so I picked “sun”. When I was homeschooled, we had to do apps to learn and get better at reading and math at home, so there were pictures of that on my iPad.
A mom and kid hugging
This is also from the learning app. I took lots of pictures of the screen with my camera because it’s fun. It looked cool.
Elf on the stairs with gingerbread man
So this was on Christmas Eve, and this was my Elf on the Shelf (the one in the red hat) and I put my Gingerbread Man next to her. It was eight at night, and we were just heading up for bed, and then when I woke up in the morning, the Elf was gone (because that’s what happens on Christmas Eve night), but the Gingerbread Man was still sitting on the railing!
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.