As a young child, photographer Jenny Fine learned to play dress-up with her grandmother.
For hours, the two would live in a world of discovery and possibility. They made costumes and staged tableaus, and when Fine began to study photography, they took pictures together.
“(My grandmother) was really a collaborator for me,” Fine says. “She was always really patient with me as someone learning the tradition of photography.”
The two of them would find props and costumes, Fine says, and her grandmother would tell family stories in the Southern Gothic tradition only a true Tennessean could muster, with deeply flawed characters and dark humor.
Fine’s work – bizarre, surreal, strange – is her attempt to extend that creative relationsh
ip with her grandmother. Her exhibition Flat Granny and Me – which was on display at the Dublin Arts Council gallery until June – was influenced by her Southern upbringing. It was also influenced by two photographic traditions: postmortem photography and the recent Flat Daddy/Mommy cut-outs that military families use to include the absent loved one in everyday celebrations as a way to ease the pain of separation.
Flat Granny has evolved to using cut-outs of previous photographs and enlarging them, then enlisting a model to animate the images. The oversized hands and head accentuate the tragicomic tone.
“I call her Flat Granny because this is Flat Granny,” Fine says. “It’s not my grandmother, but it is sort of me interacting with her and creating her as a way of me trying to get back to her.”
Though Fine’s grandmother did not live to see the exhibition, Fine considers her a living, willing participant. There she is in Silence, both shouting a message and receiving it. In a series called The Saddest Day, Fine and her father and grandmother don pig masks and re-enact a day in which all the hogs on the family farm contracted a deadly virus.
“My daddy, uncle and grandma had to slaughter all the hogs on the same day,” Fine says.
Beyond models, her family members are willing collaborators, with her grandmother the most enthusiastic.
The photographs evoke curiosity and wonder. A modern-day riff on Grimm’s fairy tales, they are familiar and yet exotic – emotions one might experience as a relationship develops between a child and an older, wiser, eccentric adult. And this adult happened to be a bomb inspector during World War II and learned to swim at 65 years of age.
“And so when she died, I really felt like I wanted to extend that space of creating and that space of possibility, because in a way, she made it so comfortable for me,” Fine says. “I wanted to extend that space of creating alongside her. And in a way, it made me feel really brave.”
Fine moved from life-sized photographs of her grandmother as props to cardboard cut-outs that work like puppets.
A nationally recognized photographer with master of fine arts degree from The Ohio State University and a 2012 honoree of the Greater Columbus Arts Council’s artist-in-residence program in Dresden, Germany, Fine remains down-to-earth. She is gentle, humble, curious and open, characteristics that no doubt drive her success as an in-demand collaborator in schools a
nd artist communities in Columbus, as well as Tennessee and Alabama.
Fine’s photography reminds us that whimsical collaborations are what make us delightfully human.
In a recent photo shoot in a borrowed studio in Columbus, Fine dressed her model in a frilly collared shirt. She decided that the Flat Granny model should wear oversized rubber waders.
“I have a huge responsibility in taking these images and choosing how these images live on,” says Fine. “I don’t think that I would do it if I felt she wasn’t OK.”
Cindy Gaillard is an Emmy award-winning producer with WOSU Public Media. Learn more about the weekly arts and culture magazine show Broad & High at www.wosu.org/broadandhigh.
