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Pictures with Stories: A Memoir by Tony Mendoza
Tony Mendoza, author
Pictures with Stories: A Memoir is a book consisting of 84 photographs, each with an attached very short story. They relate to the photograph, and more often than not, the stories are amusing, or surprising, or revealing. I’m thinking that this format seems appropriate for our times, considering that nearly everyone today is a smartphone photographer, and they are all posting their photos on social media accompanied with some sort of a tale. In effect, they are doing their memoirs online. What I’ve done with mine is to pay special attention to the moments chosen, to the photographs chosen, and to the crafting of the short story underneath. In a way, this book is an exploration of how short can an effective short story be.
Pictures with Stories had an impressive early life. The Atlantic Monthly Press published an up-to-1987 version with 46 stories. Titled Stories, it received excellent reviews from major publications (the New York Times, Vogue, People) and photo-stories from that version received a Guggenheim Photography Fellowship and were shown in the first installment of the Museum of Modern Art’s New Photography Show in 1986. This version includes 28 stories from the 1987 version, and the rest are new pictures and stories. This new version is the portrait of the artist as a young man, a middle-aged man, and an older man.
Reviews
Cuban-American photographer Mendoza (Ernie: A Photographer’s Memoir) shares stories from his life in extended captions for 84 understated, compassionate, and often surreal images. The images follow Mendoza from his sunny childhood in Cuba in the 1950s through his early adulthood living in an urban commune in Boston, to courting his wife and his embrace of family life and middle age. Always willing to turn private moments into opportunities to take photos, Mendoza admits that he “figured that [his] wedding was an excellent topic for a photo project,” so he set up a makeshift studio outside of the ceremony for him to photograph the longtime married couples in attendance. In addition to photos of his personal life, Mendoza intersperses examples of his professional work, including commissioned wedding photos from the start of his career, and the images that earned him renown, such as his photo of a “very large dog about to attack an ant” and more contemporary prints of flowers. The captions often give insight into Mendoza’s life beyond the subjects in the photos; for example, the text accompanying a photo of a cat chasing a dragonfly notes that in the early 1980s, Mendoza sold prints from his museum-owned Ernie the Cat series on a New York street corner in an effort to make rent. The combination of photo essay and autobiography yields an intimate and at times touching portrait of a photographer’s life. (BookLife)
