FINDING THE MENISCUS
by Leah Rom

Book Launch
November 16, 2024
BOZOMAG

Writing about the work of photographer Sally Mann in 1994 for the New York Review of Books, Janet Malcolm riffs on the noted opening line of Anna Karenina: “All happy childhoods are alike: they are the skin that memory has grown over a wound.” Malcolm is commenting on family pictures; specifically, Mann’s photographs of her three children, published in Immediate Family. These are some of the most beautiful and indelible photographs I have ever seen, of Mann’s three children, in and around their home in Lexington, Virginia. They are also photographs that were lambasted by conservative pundits and columnists during the moral panic of the late 1980s and early 1990s—for their depictions of nudity, and perhaps even more so, as Malcolm notes, for their depictions of the vulnerability of childhood. 

This vexing vulnerability is not uniquely limited to the purview of childhood. Pictures from Home, Larry Sultan’s seminal collection of photographs of his parents in their Southern California home throughout the 1980s, is haunted by it too. Published in 1992, the same year as Immediate Family, the photographs in Pictures from Home are collaged together with stills from home videos and Sultan’s own writings, including conversations with his parents. Sultan recalls one conversation in which his father accuses him of “making us look older and more despairing than we really feel.” Everyone seems to be worried that the family photographs show people falling apart. Mann and Sultan know that their photos are both true and untrue; they are not documentary in situ, nor are they fiction, but a third thing.  

In Finding the Meniscus, Leah Rom moves back in with her mother and makes her own set of family pictures inspired by the dynamic between the two—the soft edges dividing them, the mirrors they become for each other. This collection of photographs from the cloistral years of 2020 and 2021 sees a returned daughter get closer and closer to her mother—close enough to see the foliage caught in her hair and the droplets of water splattered across her glasses—and also, close enough to realize that with the viewfinder pointed outward, she may only be looking in.  As she moves out of the snug nucleus of her mother’s kitchen, photographs of friends mingle with the pictures taken at home. Euphoric and frenetic, Leah’s flash bounces hard off shiny places and people; the quotidian refuse of daily life—a cup of tea, a cheese grater, a box of bandaids—is gleaming and exalted too. Like Pictures from Home, which Leah cites both explicitly and implicitly, this collection of photographs is something of the photographer’s portrait of the self. Yet, there is that third thing. That insistent wish that the photographs do the impossible—capture the world. As Larry Sultan says, “I want my parents to live forever.”

—Kate Rouhandeh