|
 Susan
Markisz
< smarkisz@digitalstoryteller.com
>
Contributing Photographer
The Riverdale Press, NY
Freelance for the New York Times
Photo by: Will Brooks
Susan
Markisz is a freelance photographer for The New York Times and a Contributing
Photographer for The Riverdale Press. She can't imagine doing anything
else for a living.
About Susan:
A late bloomer, I
came to photography about 10 years ago when my children were still little
and college was but a distant memory. In a zen kind of way I was meant
to do it.
|
I've been taking
pictures most of my life. At 14, my aunt gave me my first camera,
a Kodak 104 instamatic which took square pictures with teeny tiny
square negatives. I was (and still am) the family historian.
I received a
Bachelor of Arts Degree in Linguistics and Foreign Languages in
1974 (Spanish and German). "What are you going to do with THAT?"
my mother asked. "Speak Spanish, of course," I answered
confidently.
In 1973 I went
to Spain and finished my baccalaureate degree at the University
of Seville, learned to tell jokes in Spanish, which was when I knew
I'd really learned the language. With my long blonde hair and nearly
6 ft. height, I was a dead giveaway as an American, but no one could
tell by my decidedly Andalulsian accent.
What was disappointing,
however, were the results of my copious "film- letting."
During my travels throughout Europe, I took pictures of Moorish
palaces and tapas bars, castles and windmills, narrow cobblestone
streets, the gypsies of Seville, and of Holy Week and Feria celebrations
that I imagined belonged in National Geographic. When I'd retrieve
my pictures from the photofinisher at Galerias Preciados or Corte
Ingles, I'd wonder why they weren't masterpieces. It had never occurred
to me to study photography.
After a stint
in Spain teaching English, travelling around Europe for nearly two
years and discovering my German relatives 15 years after my grandmother
died, I experienced the thrill of printing my first black and white
pictures with a German cousin who was also a graphic artist and
photographer.
|
"Catholic
Church, Gollheim, Germany"
©
1974 Susan Bibb
My
grandmother, emigrated on steerage to the USA in 1906 at the age
of 16, leaving behind her parents, and 7 of her 10 brothers and
sisters. She converted to Catholicism sometime after her arrival
in this country. Elisabeth returned to Germany before her marriage
and spent a year living with her parents. As the story has been
handed down to me by my mother, my grandmother was not allowed to
attend Mass on Sunday mornings, because of her parent's disapproval
of her conversion. My grandmother would sit on the steps of her
home on Sunday mornings and cry as the church bells tolled. This
photograph was taken 15 years after my grandmother's death.
|
 |
In 1975, I returned
to familiar turf (New York) where I was in the Spanish wine business
for a good number of years, continuing to speak Spanish every day,
as promised, and travelling to Spain on business in search of new
wines and new labels for the burgeoning Spanish wine industry in
the US.
Cut to 1987.
Married with 2 small children, I decided to take a "continuing-
education" course in photography (never mind, I hadn't had
"beginning" education in it.) Teacher says: "You're
great, keep shooting." And so I did.
Two years and
several courses and seminars at local colleges and International
Center of Photography later, I began offering features to my local
newspaper, which began publishing them as often as I submitted them.
I'll never forget seeing my first picture published. What a thrill!...
(and what an awful picture, in hindsight). But fear ye not, readers,
I've improved.
|
In late 1988 I was
almost (read loudly ALMOST) sidelined with breast cancer. Photography
probably helped to save my life.
|
Some of the
most significant pictures
I've made in my life have had to do with breast cancer. I began
doing self portraits in 1989. One of my earliest pictures recalls
that incident at the college gallery. It is a picture of a bra and
a prosthesis. I call it "Still Life; Life, Still."
My self portraits
evolved into a project photographing other women with breast cancer.
That I never received the anticipated grants to continue my project
from NEA or Guggenheim was extraordinarily disappointing, but in
hindsight, I needed a break from such an intensely personal project.
I had made friends with many of the women I'd photographed and some
had died.
1992 was the
first time any of my self portraits was published. "The Road
Back" had been accepted by the "Alternative Visions: Women
in Photojournalism" NPPA Conference in Providence of that year
and the Providence Journal Sunday Magazine published it. I was overwhelmed
by the reaction to the photograph; many people approached me to
talk to me about it at the exhibition opening. I think it was the
first time in my life I felt enormously powerful...and saw that
one of my images could speak to so many people.
Since then my
breast cancer work has been published in the Encyclopaedia Brittanica,
The Journal of the National Cancer Institute, and many other publications,
it has been exhibited in the US House of Representatives Cannon
Building Rotunda, where it was promptly censored for "unsuitablility
for viewing by the general public;" it is on loan to the National
Alliance of Breast Cancer Organizations in New York and the Women's
Cancer Program at the Mayo Clinic; and is in the permanent collections
of The National Museum of Women in the Arts and Museum of Art, Rhode
Island School of Design, and other museums and is continually being
exhibited both nationally and internationally. I narrowly missed
being the "cover girl" for The New York Times Sunday Magazine
article on breast cancer in 1993; they chose Matuschka's very powerful
image instead. I consoled myself with the fact that (some sour grapes
notwithstanding,) I never wanted to be known as "the woman
who comes from breast cancer."
But it's never
very far away. In addition to being a Contributing Photographer
for The Riverdale Press, where I work part time/full time and have
the unusual good fortune to own copyright to all of my work, I also
freelance occasionally for The New York Times and I work as a Contributing
Writer and Photographer for MAMM Magazine, a new magazine for women
with breast and ovarian cancer. Like I said, it's never very far
away.
|
About 4 weeks after my mastectomy, there was
a little photography show at the college gallery for the students.
I'd just gotten my prosthesis 24 hours earlier, thrilled that there
was something more substantial in my bra than a piece of puff cotton
(is anyone embarrassed here?---I hope not), read on, it's a funny
story.
I was helping the professor
and another fellow hang the show. I bent over to pick up one of
the pictures off the floor, and out sailed this squishy pink blob
of silicone from my sweater. For a split second, I failed to recognize
the prosthesis but then my life flashed before my eyes in embarrassment.
I had nowhere to put it, no pockets, no purse to hide it, so...
I lifted up my sweater and put it back into
my bra. The guys were unfazed. The way I figured it was I could
either laugh or cry about it and I'd already cried enough. The mastectomy
"lingerie" they sell today, has "pockets" so
that doesn't happen.
|
As of this writing,
my children are 16 and 13 (doing away with the teenage years might be
a good thing; note I didn't say the teenAGERS themselves!) My kids have
been both willing and reluctant subjects, but I have enough material and
images to do a book, and maybe even a comedy routine. My husband of 22
years has been very supportive of my photographic endeavors but he patiently
awaits the day I can get a studio of my own.
After this much verbiage,
he would say: "Susan, you've used up your allotment of words for
the day."
Susan Markisz
February 1998
|
