Daniella Ciccone

When my 14 year-old-granddaughter was a very little girl, then, as now she would sit opposite me at the dinner table. She would scream at me crying, “Don’t see me!” Now the tables are turned and she stares at me unwaveringly with a poker face. Today (I am writing this on November 30 2016) I asked her why she stared at me. Her answer was an unsatisfying, “Well to look at Abi (my Rosemary) I have to glance to the right.”

When I began to photograph Rebecca, my older granddaughter who is now 19) I never asked her to smile or laugh and to always look into the lens of my camera. Other members of the family, particularly her other grandparents wanted to know why in my portraits of the girls they never smiled or laughed. I tried to explain (to no avail) that the girls never volunteered to smile or laugh so that’s what I thought they wanted. I also explained that in the first photographs of children in the 19^th century and particularly those of Julia Margaret Cameron they were serious for the camera. I further mentioned that children in Victorian times were treated as adults (to their detriment in their abuse in terrible working environments).

Alice Liddell by Julia Margaret Cameron, Rebecca Stewart & Isabell d'Medici by Bronzino

To delve into Lewis Carol and his relationship with Alice Liddell would have complicated matters even more. I simply stuck to my purpose and photographed my granddaughters staring into my camera with a serious expression.

I believe that to look into a person’s eyes is to get at a hint (life force, soul, spark) that makes them individuals and different from me. I know that looking into a mirror confirms my individuality and existence and that I am even alive.

From Sleeping Beauty - Memorial Photography in America by Stanley Burns, M.D.

With the discovery of photography in the early 19th century photographers (unable to apply what they knew about math with infinitesimals and asymptotes) thought that if they pointed their camera at a person about to die they might catch that moment between life and death. Of course they failed. Both my granddaugthers, Rebecca and Lauren often look at the pictures of my Sleeping Beauty-Memoria Photography in America by Stanley Burns, M.D.

Jorge Luís Borges - Diane Arbus

 My confusion troubles me when I approach the idea of a blind man like my favourite Argentine poet Jorge Luís Borges who became blind at a young middle age. My confusion troubles me when I stare into the eyes of Rosemary’s cat, Casi-Casi. Can he think? Is he aware of his existence? At other times like many cats he does not want to be started at and looks away or closes his eyes.

This is a similar reaction (looking away) when I would stare at my early attempts into finding if a girl liked me. If they were to stare back I would immediately act like Casi-Casi.

There are many stories and superstitions in Latin America about a “mal hojo” and how such a person with an evil eye can cause you to experience unfortunate events.

I have wanted for years to test a belief I have about how we look at people and how they do it in return. The experiment is to place a young person (20s) in a room and have the person facing a camera on a tripod with a simple light to one side that cannot be moved. Then one by one the person’s father, mother, dentist, brother or sister, boyfriend or girlfriend, teacher, etc would individually take one snap. I maintain that with some judicious examination of the photographs one would be able who took each picture if thrown to the floor in a jumble.

Rebecca & the agave