Photographs At The Gig Harbor History Museum

Photographs At The Gig Harbor History Museum

Photograph 1

It is not the dress at all.  It is her.  We already know the strapless bra with set-in wire structure, the permanent wave, the painful heels were going to be folded into a box.  Maybe the lens is seeing the camera's enemy, it is the photographer's chance encounter with a woman making an effort to become a fashion model.  Maybe she has no professional clockwork glow to summon.  Maybe from other experiences, like anxiety, she is constrained.  The title of the portrait is a Scandinavian name, maybe the staid Lutheran church continues as a mortification in so much nakedness.  It cannot reach her, the soft material, no sleeves, no straps, the structured top and the full skirt cannot move her face express anything but her in already work-worn early twenties.  In the portrait I see no happiness, no self-confidence, no pleasure. 

Photograph 2

In another photograph of a Northwest Rock Band in Canada, a girl's shoulders appear to wear a knit shift dress, which suggests - go-go-boots?  There is a package of cigarettes. 

Photograph 3

There is - Corning Ware.  It is tiny in the very large square photograph, the two casseroles stacked unmistakeable beyond the living room in the distant kitchen.  There are two stories, all windows, with all the lights on and the dog's home on the bedroom deck.   The photographer's home in Gig Harbor, photographed in Northwest Modern - Eastern Religion and Nature.  It is the size and the theme of art downtown when I was in Junior High School and could find that location of the museum and go in there.  (This is a list from a postcard of the public library's Random. Modern. in early 2008 - Inez Hill Bailey, Virginia Banks, Dorothy Chase, Bill Colby, Polly Crane, Louise Gilbert, Thomas Cooper Harmer, Yvonne Twinning Humber, B.J. Hyde, Julia MacFarland, Viola Patterson, Ruth Pennington, Lola Wheeler.  Selected from the collection of Hagen / Waer.)  Emotionally, to spend time with that point of view once again was warm.  This photograph in this size repeats that warmth.  That is about my background.

The museum is now seven dollars instead of six.  I had brought the card about the exhibit along.  The address was quite a ride along the waterfront in downtown Gig Harbor's strange traffic jam.  Not a lot of crosswalks and these are necessary.  The card has been a beautiful thing to view on the refrigerator door for some time, I am happy that I did go out to see this gallery of Jini Dellacio photographs.