George Forss - The Art of Norma Forss Portraits

The Art of Norma Forss Portraits

Copyright 2020 by George Forss

ISBN: 978-1-64749-202-1

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T here are three things I want you to know about my mother, Norma Forss:

1.She was always an uninhibited non-conformist.

2.She was always having fun in her life.

3.She had a magical charm about her like no one I have known. She had a charm that is very much like her photography.

I would say that all three of these traits are due to a great natural spirit of self-assurance she possessed. Self assurance is a great facility to have in our living experience but it can be fraught with danger while it lasts. Somehow, it seems as though a person who is so free from conformity is going to get into trouble all the time. Borrowing another slang phrase from my mothers time, you could say this pet chant phrase ... Youre gonna ge t yours !

My mother would just not obey the rules in any place that she lived. It all started early for my mother when she lived with strict, dominant, parents. She had to hide her interests in photography and jazz music. After this, her mother, Fabiola, died of cancer. Norma now had to live in poverty that forced her to become very street wise. Teaming up with her brother Gino, she made do somehow and she had a lot of fun photographing people on tenement roofs in New Yorks Greenwich Village area. There is evidence in the pictures she took in those early days that shows she was free spirit now. I have a lot of these ne gatives.

Isnt Greenwich Village where all free spirits want to go ? She was living in this area anyway, in the Little Italy section, with her mother and some relatives. They were immigrants from Italy. The family name is Pardi. My mothers relatives were split like all families can be split ... between those who were educated conformists and those who were not. The conformists tend to do well financially and the others do not. This is what being educated and being a conformist is all about. This is why we have rather strict rules in society. My mother however was probably bored by all of rules of society. At the age of 13 she started her life of fun. Im not kidding ! When I was a kid I would wake up in the morning and say ... Aw, ma ... I dont want to go to school today. Without hesitation, my mother would say ... OK. On such a day, my mother would take us to Times Square, Central Park, The Staten Island Ferry, plus many more fun things we could do.

One more thing you need to know about my mom here: She was always doing her Box Camera

Photography. Photography started for my mother while her mother, Fabiola, was still alive. Fabiola Pardi was a stately woman who was trying to raise her children properly in a new land. She actually forbade my mother from using a camera and also from playing Pop Tunes Records. My mother used to hide her box camera on an outside ledge of a window in her bedroom. Her mother simply smashed a lot of her records but she managed to save some of these. Fabiola simply wanted her daughter, Norma, to get married someday and raise a family. She was old fashioned in this way. I think my mother was an early Hi ppie type.

I think the greatest peril my mother faced in her life was that she wasnt very scientific. This cost her dearly. This is a strange thing to describe because her portraits actually defy science ! I cannot determine scientifically how my mothers photography is so technically astute. I also did not know that my mothers pictures were so great. The reason for this is I just did not study all of my mothers photography until ten years after her death. I now find that my mother has about 1000 negatives of great pictures that she took. Now I know how good all of her portraits are. I just figured that I already had seen her best work.

I dont know why I reasoned this way. I know I have had unusual luck in my picture taking, or I knew to wait on my subjects until I saw a great picture before me. Many photographers shoot multiple images knowing that by sheer luck they will find a few good ones. My mother doesnt have any lucky shots ... all of them are good ! What I now know is that almost all of my mothers pictures are the equal of great art posing. This is truly amazing to me. Here is another slang-like phrase I can use here ... Oh yeah, pr ove it !

Heres the proof: Look at all of the images in this book. Notice how each subject is so beautifully postured with very natural-like facial expressions ... expressions that show the subjects natural exuberance ... that are the equal of the best art of portraiture. Exuberanc e ? Yes,

I did not know how great my mothers photography was until a few months ago. I knew she had some great images. The people at Time and Life knew how good her work is. They became aware of her portraits after I got discovered for my own photography. I was showing some of my mothers portraits around and I just assumed that I had all of the good ones. Mostly, her Movie Star portraits intrigued the Time and Life people. My mother only has 125 movie star negatives and about 25 of these are so special ... as special as her portraits of children. I now know she was shooting for luck with these ... and with her special skill of knowing just when to make her exposures on film. She could not pose a Movie Star for an hour or so the way that she did her portraits of children to make these portraits so perfect. The Stars that she captured so well were greatly charmed by her presence ... with a mere box camera ... that they naturally had just the right kind of look about them that my mother wanted. Look at the facial expressions of these, they are as good as her child portraits. You can see this in the best portraits she did of the stars. With some other stars she missed the focus or that her quick picture taking just did not work. I am afraid I made the automatic assumption that most of her pictures were like this ... that she had very many misses. How she knew the focus and the expert use of her flash bulbs at all is a mystery to me. A box camera does not have variable focus. It has a focus of about 35 feet. I know this because I tested two of my mothers cameras. I remember that she used a set of diopter close up lenses in front of her camera as she made a picture.

The thing was that I did not how great all of her images of children are. Only now am I exploring hundreds of her negatives and finding this out. All of them from 1930s to 1980s. Another thing that is a hindrance to my discovering my mothers photography is the awful condition of hundreds of my moms negatives. They were all stored in cardboard boxes and were soiled by cat piss fumes and such ! I am being blunt but you will understand when you read further. Like, uh ... my mother had 27 cats at one point in her life ... when we lived in Brooklyn, NY. Some of her negatives are stuck together. I cant even rescue these. At least not yet. If I need to I can submerge them in a water soak. This is the way film negatives are processed ... in water mixed with chemicals.