These are images of my family starting mid 1950’s when my parents met,
through late 1980’s when they divorced, ending mid 90’s with images
ART
of me in my adult life. It is a visual essay of the unraveling of the typical

middle class Southern California family.


Fluxion
The earliest photos taken from the mid 1950’s where my parents were at

the height of teen fashion resembling Buddy Holly and Peggy Lee who
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had met in Whittier California. High School sweethearts, my father was 4
a rock-in-roll rebel and my mother, the lovely blonde rich girl who wanted
desperately away from her own family, through the late 1960’s when
I entered the picture and they start to resemble Dennis Hopper in
“Easy Rider” and Jane Fonda in “They Still Shoot Horses, Don’t They?”,
followed by photos taken during the 1970’s and ending darkly in 1985
when the desire to capture family memories was clearly the last thing
on either of their minds.
Their wedding was a hipsters tiki-lounge dream come true…. exotica
dé cor complete with tiki masks, fishing net wall hangings and a light blue
1965 VW bug with “Just Married” spray painted on the side parked just
outside the chapel awaiting their honeymoon journey to Las Vegas after
the ceremony. A year later they adopted me at birth.
After a turbulent marriage filled with drugs, alcohol, violence and attempted
suicide, they divorced in 1986. To this day neither have remarried.
In 2001 with my own full-blown addiction to drugs and alcohol and a
recent break-up with the last relationship I’ve had to date, I found myself
in yet another difficult obligatory visit to my adopted mothers home
where I grew up. I had successfully kept a healthy distance from both
parents blaming them for being the source of most of my problems and
judging them as unfit and unequipped parents.
During this visit I found a rather large box sitting unassumingly in front
of the sliding glass back door containing hundred’s upon hundred’s of
photos from dozens of now torn up photo albums, old mothers day cards,
report cards, her very own wedding pics which she obtained during her very
ugly divorce. (My father decided to take all the living room furniture when
he left unannounced back in 1985 instead of any photos or keepsakes.) As
I rifled through the box, I realized the box contained every old memory
of her life—me included—waiting to be thrown out with the rest of the
garbage. I realized I would probably want these photos some day, so I took
the box home and tucked it away where it sat for years, untouched.
Years later during a move to a new home and in the grips of a debilitating
methamphetamine addiction, I opened the box studied the hundred’s of
These images are my personal favorites photos spanning the five decades, recalling old memories good and bad
simply because I don’t recognize these
and then examining my own life, behavior, character defects and “learned
two individuals. I never knew them.
My earliest memory of my parents was
communication skills”. The painful irony I discovered was as that I was
violent, as their quarrels were truly “hitting bottom”, I had followed in both of their exact footsteps regardless
frightening. To me, the man and woman
of how much distance I had put between us or how conscious I was as to
in these early photos are complete strangers.
both of their character defects. My mother’s blind addiction to rage, her
relentless resentments towards others, especially her own mother, my
father and me; her dangerous frustration and continual and very verbal
disappointment at the circumstances of her life; as well as her impressive
sense of self, strong determination and incredible survival instincts.
A bizarre paradox. Then, my fathers blinding affinity towards alcohol,
narcotics and self destruction, his inability to face his own childhood
demons which invariably led to the loss of cars, homes, career, family
and friends and self esteem, not to mention his amazing compassion,
patience and understanding and love.
Now complete, this project has inadvertently become a device to forgive
them and myself for not having or the tools to achieve the perfect family
or to become the individual we all struggle to become.
Dedicated to Ricky Terry.
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