Portraits Of People with Their Former Selves

The other day I had the privilege of attending a fantastic show at the Lehman Concert Hall in the Bronx, New York called The Three Kings and Their Queens which was a tribute to the musicians of the Mambo era of the 1950s and 60s.

I had spotted a very animated woman in a wheelchair in the front row of the theatre who knew all the music and seemed delighted to be there. Later on I encountered her in the foyer:

She – Violeta Fernandez Marrero – and her companion happened to be holding a poster of herself in her youth, when she had been a dancer at the legendary Palladium Ballroom. The Palladium is referred to as the home of the Mambo, where likes of Machito, Tito Puente and Celia Cruz regularly performed.

It reminded me that earlier in the year I had photographed my mother, also a former dancer, holding a photograph of her and her recently deceased husband. The photograph reminded me of a glossy still from an 80s show such as Dynasty or The Colbys. It was proof that Dalia and Dov were a glamorous couple who went on Caribbean cruises and danced the Paso Doble:

I have been drawn to photographing people combined with images of their former selves for decades now. When I was a photography student at PCL (now University of Westminster) in the late 80s and early 90s I worked on a project where I photographed friends, family and myself against a projected backdrop of a scanned image of ourselves as children taken from personal family album. For me, combining two slices of life created a more complex, layered representation. Here are some examples:

I had also looked into ideas of nostalgia and memory – below – my mother Dalia looks at her old photo album. Her red manicure and feathery, high heeled mule slippers connote her ongoing glamour:

Then in 2025, I caught her looking through another album featuring photos from her dancing days:

When my mother’s husband died in January 2025, one of his grandson’s claimed a photo of himself as a toddler that adorned a shelf above their TV:

The child’s long flowing locks are traditional for Orthodox Jews boys who have their first haircut at around the age of 3 (see my blog on the Ushperin Ritual).

The photo below is also connected to the theme of long hair. Adrienne who I know from a Pilates studio we both attend, is holding a portrait of herself aged 8. A few weeks earlier we’d been discussing the Barbie phenomenon and I told her that as a kid I preferred Sindy and Tressy dolls. She then revealed that back in the 60s she had been used in the original UK Tressy publicity partly because of her super long hair at the time. She no longer has the press images but brought in this 1960s studio portrait which had been taken at a later stage:

I have referred to Susan Sontag in previous blog, who in her seminal book On Photography described photography as a chronicle of mortality and photographs themselves as Memento Mori. I think that the portraits of people and their former selves are connected to these ideas by combining two slices of life in one image, which in itself is a moment that is frozen in time.

Links:

The Three Kings and Their Queens

Tressy Doll