elin o’Hara slavick

 

Nancy is probably my age now, 45. She looks as if she is about 4 or 5 in the photograph, the age I would have been in 1969. I loved this photograph the first time I saw it – decades ago. I now look at the framed vintage print every day, as it hangs above our dining room table. It is one of the only valuable (according to the superficial and capitalist market) pieces of art I own. Emmet Gowin delivers one of the best and most inspiring lectures – half sermon, half story-telling, illuminated by his unforgettable and magical images we would never see if he did not fix them permanently for us with his camera, including  Nancy. Nancy twists her soft and inquisitive arms into a yoga snake prayer, holding two delicate fresh eggs – her forming ovaries, Bataille eyes of hope and desire, ovals of chance and light held lightly in her perfect hands; her head thrown back ever so slightly in joyful determination to pose just so, the crumpled white cotton nightdress just slept and woken in, country starlet bangs framing her eyes wide shut, her closed lips, that fierce youth. She fills the grassy field with spectacular energy, her body a glowing root, an immortalized girl about to feast, offering us the world.