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Susan Markisz (Smarkisz@aol.com)
Photojournalist
The Riverdale Press
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.
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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. |
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.
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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.
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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.
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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
