Try This With an Old Family Photo

Time travel with Google Maps

Two Houses. Two Painters. Two Parents. is a newsletter of stories about art, feminism, grief, and time excavated from the Soho loft where I grew up. Posts are free and illustrated with the work of my long-divorced parents, the painters Mimi Weisbord and Lennart Anderson. Sign up here:

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Linger on a photo until it becomes a portal to walk through — breathing three dimensions from two — with a little help from Google Maps.

Here is my father on a city street corner.

Lennart Anderson in the 1950s or early 60s.

There must be a reason this snapshot was taken?

But my mother, Mimi, was taking so many pictures in this era, a medium made more and more accessible, and of course, as an artist, she was attracted to framing an image.

After her death, I found this photo among those taken in Paris and Italy. Initially, I shuffled past it, presuming it belonged there. I did not observe the street signs for 5th Avenue and E 82nd Street. And when I did, I didn't stop to think about that Manhattan address as I plugged it into Google Maps.

There, I found that same building over 60 years later.

What fun! A sense of time travel, and the satisfaction of rooting them to a specific still-existent location.

When I was writing my memoir, I took a walk between certain addresses — from the studio apartment my father had in the 50s to The Five Spot Cafe (jazz club), the Cedar bar, the Artists Club — only to find so much of the city in that era has since been urban-renewed, whole blocks razed. The Five Spot is now a senior housing complex.

A Five Spot brochure that my father sent to my mother in 1957.

Still, the address in the photo of my father didn’t register with me, and I’m glad.

Because in the next moment, I had the pleasure of rotating the scene to understand where they were and finding

… the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

This photo of Lennart is from a time when my parents shared their interests and pleasures, years before divorce court. Suddenly, here was a window to what first attracted them to one another.

Rotating that scene with Google’s street-level images put Mimi’s camera in my hands. I became her, pivoting on my heel.

And because I’ve sifted so many of her photos, I sensed her satisfaction in snapping that shutter.

The photo of my father fits with other snapshots she left behind — not artsy compositions — but records of her delight as a teen at the doors of New York art museums years before she’d ever met Lennart Anderson.

Mimi Weisbord at the door to the Museum of Modern Art in the 1950s.

Also, trips to the city with her girlfriends.

Mimi Weisbord (right) and a college girlfriend (Joyce Greenfield?) in front of the Guggenheim Museum in the 1950s.

Seeing those tender images deepens my understanding of how much she yearned to leave Philadelphia for New York’s art world. The photo of my father, taken with her back to the steps of the Met (where years later I begged for a hot pretzel with mustard) is a candid shot of her painter boyfriend (or was he then her husband?) in the city she loved. Here was her life’s dream realized.

Yet my father is carrying a case of some kind in that photograph. What is the occasion for taking it? Is he going somewhere?

Regardless, my mother has already arrived.

Have you found an old photograph that brings you street level with a parent’s life or perspective? Or an experience with another artifact to share?

Lennart Anderson and Mimi Weisbord caught talking (many decades after divorce court), at a Prince Street Gallery show opening of Mimi’s work.