That’s My Mama

Photographer Jill Anna Greenberg takes a wide-angle view of the woman who raised her with love.

By: Jodi Thompson
   She hears it all the time: "I want your mother to adopt me." "Can I have your mom?" "Let’s switch moms." The reason can be seen on the walls of The Summer Kitchen in Penn’s Park. The subject in the two photography series, Mamarama and Mamarama Mia!, is vibrant, jubilant, indulgent.
   She hears it all the time: "I want your mother to adopt me." "Can I have your mom?" "Let’s switch moms." The reason can be seen on the walls of The Summer Kitchen in Penn’s Park. The subject in the two photography series, Mamarama and Mamarama Mia!, is vibrant, jubilant, indulgent.


"My Flighty Mother," from the Mamarama Mia! series, in Florence, Italy, 1996.

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  Photo by Jill Anna Greenberg

   Philadelphia resident Jill Anna Greenberg, by day a suburban staff photographer for The Philadelphia Inquirer, has created an exhibit of panoramic photographs of her mother she calls "a sort of improvisation we dance whenever we spend time together." It runs through June.
   The dozen pieces, culled from both series, hang amid the pickled wood beams, tile floor and stained glass windows of The Summer Kitchen restaurant, literally a summer kitchen in a typical Bucks County fieldstone farmhouse along Route 232. The restaurant itself is a find, located in Penn’s Park Shopping Village. The entrance to the shopping village from the parking lot is through a breezeway with a wooden sign above: "Peace to all who enter here." It is peaceful, landscaped and lovely. The Summer Kitchen is straight ahead with al fresco dining next to a pond.
   Inside is just as inviting, made more so by Ms. Greenberg’s works, including "My Flighty Mother." In the piece, the artist’s joyful mother, Helen, holds her arms outstretched as numerous pigeons take flight in an Italian piazza.

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"Every Day is Mother’s Day," from the Mamarama Mia! series, in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., 1995.

Photo by Jill Anna Greenberg  

   There is "Every Day is Mother’s Day," in which Ms. Greenberg’s own outstretched hand holds a nosegay of flowers toward her mother.
   "I was on roller-skates when I shot that, skating backwards on a path," Ms. Greenberg says. "I love that picture because there’s something very spontaneous about it. It’s one of the ones that just sort of happened.
   "The other one that just sort of happened by magic is ‘The Travel Journal,’ where instead of posing it — ‘Hey, Mom, do this. Hey, Mom, do that’ — I was actually just taking a break on our trip to Italy. I think I was having a sad moment or something. It was a long, tiring day, and I just looked up and I was just, ‘Look at this,’ " she says.
   She captured her mother’s handwriting in her travel journal. Ms. Greenberg says her mother obsessively writes about her adventures to relive them again and again.


"The Travel Journal," from the Mamarama Mia! series, in Siena, Italy, 1996.

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  Photo by Jill Anna Greenberg

   The Mamarama series as a whole is nearly as impromptu as some of its individual pieces. Ms. Greenberg’s mother was visiting her daughter from her home in Cincinnati in 1994. She requested a photograph of herself in front of the Forrest Theater, where as a teen-ager she had danced in the Broadway-bound musical, High Button Shoes. Ms. Greenberg complied with a $20 plastic lens panoramic camera she had recently acquired. She writes in her artist’s statement that it was the start of a project to document "the changes in my mother from the evolving perspective of our relationship as we both age."
   The photographs in Mamarama are from family visits to Baltimore, Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Martha’s Vineyard. Five of the works appeared as a photo essay with text in The Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Mother’s Day of 1996. Mamarama Mia! is a series of photos taken in Italy.
   The elder Ms. Greenberg has been a willing participant in her daughter’s work. Her dance background gives her a certain degree of animation that the camera captures, according to her daughter.


"The Smile that Lights Up Florence," from the Mamarama Mia! series, in Florence, Italy, 1996.

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  Photo by Jill Anna Greenberg

   "When you put the camera in front of her and things are clicking — things aren’t always clicking — she lights up, literally. Something happens when we’re on to something. It seems something clicks into gear and there’s an excitement that happens."
   Ms. Greenberg says she was able to capture the images because she used cameras that are quick and spontaneous, not true panoramic cameras, but various 35mm point-and-shoot cameras with panoramic settings in which the frame is masked in the camera top and bottom. A true panoramic camera actually has a lens that rotates.
   "I had this new plastic panoramic camera. It was so nice because you just pull it out. You have no control over anything. You get what you get," she says. "You can’t really sweat it too much. I tend to sweat things: ‘Am I doing it right?’ And you can’t sweat it when you don’t have control. You can’t focus, you just click."
   She is just beginning to work with a Nikon N-70QD that has a panoramic setting and allows her more control. Three of the photographs are Durst Lambda Digital D Prints, which allowed Ms. Greenberg to sharpen images, remove flaws and eliminate background distractions. However, the digital process creates more obstacles for the artist.

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"Italian Leather," from the Mamarama Mia! series, in Florence, Italy, 1996.

Photo by Jill Anna Greenberg  

   Fortunately, her mother doesn’t seem to share her control issues. She has a history of tolerance with her daughter’s artistic forays. As a teen-ager, Ms. Greenberg covered everything in one of the family’s bathrooms with silver foil and filled the room with red water, red flowers, red everywhere.
   "It was insane," says the artist, describing her home art installation. "I did it at three or four in the morning. It was a strange, strange project, and she left it up for three or four weeks. That’s a level of indulgence."
   "Waking Up," a photograph shot on Martha’s Vineyard, illustrates that toleration has its limits. The subject is in bed, with the covers pulled up to her chin, giving off vibes clearly of the go-away-and-leave-me-alone variety. "There are times, believe it or not, when she’s been a little cranky about it," Ms. Greenberg says. "But she participates."


"The Queen of Longwood Gardens," from the Mamarama Mia! series, in Kennett Square, Pa., 1994.

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  Photo by Jill Anna Greenberg

   Occasionally, she isn’t co-operative, as in the case of a piece that’s curiously absent from this show.
   "I actually marched in on her (in the bathroom) after her shower," Ms. Greenberg says. "She has a red robe on, sitting on the toilet putting lotion on her arm. She’s wanted to smack me a couple of times."
   Ms. Greenberg knows she is lucky to have, for the most part, a willing subject.
   "I find four-leaf clovers all the time," she says. "It’s just this thing about me. It’s almost as if they find me." She plans to incorporate her clover collection into a future work. For now, she counts her lucky clovers that her mother has been such a good subject. Yet, as with any mother-daughter relationship, they share moments of tension and detachment. Ms. Greenberg feels the need to be honest regarding her relationship with her mother.
   "Our communication has been very strained of late," she says openly. Regardless of present strife, there is a level of affection apparent in the work.

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"Royal Tea," from the Mamarama Mia! series, in Philadelphia, Pa., 1994.

Photo by Jill Anna Greenberg  

   Ms. Greenberg writes of her mother, "Once a soloist with American Ballet Theater, my mother spent the first part of her life striving for the ethereal grace of a ballerina. When her dancing career concluded, she fought a hard-won battle to attain the far more elusive grace that comes from self-acceptance: learning what you are, and what you aren’t, what you can hope to achieve, and what, given the limitations of a life span, may not be possible." Mamarama illuminates that inner struggle and the ever-changing nature of relationships.
   "Here’s a person who loves me enough to cooperate," Ms. Greenberg says. "She’s connected to me enough to give me this rein. She enters this process — it is a process that is both of us — with a trust. She’s not controlling it."
   In a moment of epiphany, Ms. Greenberg compares the manner in which her mother shares the creative work process to that of the weimaraners of photographic artist William Wegman. The subjects of Mr. Wegman’s work, these are "dogs bred with a work ethic."
   "They may not know exactly what they are doing, but to them it’s a job," she says. "For my mom, it’s a labor of love, not hard labor. She’d call it a symbiosis."
   Mamarama is on view at The Summer Kitchen, The Gathering Shopping Village, Route 232 and Penn’s Park Road, Penn’s Park, through June. Restaurant hours: Tues. 11 a.m.-4 p.m.; Wed.-Fri. 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Sat.-Sun. 10 a.m.-10 p.m. For restaurant information, call (215) 598-9210. Ms. Greenberg can be reached through curator Susan Roseman, Riverbank Arts Inc., 19 Bridge St., Stockton, N.J. For information, call (609) 397-9330.