Beyond the Frame
Sometime around 1912, twenty-two-year-old Great Aunt Annie took a photo of Mayme and Beth, two of her younger sisters, standing on opposite sides of an unnamed friend. They were all eating apples at the same time. Annie framed the scene with her camera then snapped the photo, capturing their impish goofiness on black-and-white film. The smiles hidden by the apples show in their eyes.
Ninety years later, in February 2002, I was hiking with my three daughters, Erin, Caitlin, and Bridget, at Audubon’s Cook Canyon in Barre, Massachusetts. We stopped for a snack break. While I was fiddling with something in my knapsack, I heard giggling behind me. I turned to see the three girls holding their apples with their teeth, waiting to see how long it would be before I noticed their goofiness. I quickly took their photo.
In 1907, Annie took a photo of her sixteen-year-old brother Jim and their baby sister, four-year-old Kate (who, in fifty-four years, would become my maternal grandmother). Jim, dressed in a suit and sporting a bow tie, is sitting on the front steps of their home. In his right hand he holds a round-top, narrow-brim Bowler Derby hat. Jim’s left arm embraces Kate, who is leaning into him, embracing her brother back. It looks like an impromptu pose. Clearly, their body language is telling a story.
In the afternoon of September 30, 2006, after a tiring hike on Mt. Watatic in northern Worcester County, my then seventeen-year-old daughter, Erin, embraces her nine-year-old cousin Nolan.
If a picture is worth a thousand words, I’d wager that each one of these is worth ten times as much.
Around 1910, Annie took a photo of her mother, my great grandmother, Margaret, exiting their backyard chicken coop. In January 1990, in the same area as the original coop, my then two-year-old daughter, Caitlin, carries eggs from our recently built chicken coop. I’m sure the eggs my great grandmother collected that day made it back to the kitchen unscathed. Caitlin couldn’t always say the same about the eggs she carried.
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I first met my great aunt Annie when I was ten years old. I had been rummaging around Mayme and Beth’s attic, a place they gave me free reign to explore. A foot-pedal powered Singer sewing machine greeted me at the top of the attic stairs. I used to push the pedal with my hands to see how fast I could get the needle arm to move. They had boxes of fancy women’s hats, wide-brimmed and decorated with dried flowers or feathers, which I later learned was the fashion rage of the early 1900s. I found decades-old clothing inside boxes and chests of drawers. An old, black, high-top shoe with no match, lay folded-over near an antique rocking chair, the woven cane seat long since gone. A dusty and tarnished brass-handle parade sword of unknown origin rested high up in the rafters. Some days I’d use the blunt sword to stab imaginary pirates chasing me through the attic as I searched for the secret treasure.
And there, way back in the corner, behind all the sheet-covered unused furniture and stored clothing, I found another box, this one full of black-and-white photographs and an old camera.
I brought the box into the kitchen where Mayme and Beth were sitting at the table. “What are these pictures?” I asked.
“Annie took those,” Mayme told me. “Your great aunt, my sister.”
“She loved taking pictures,” Beth said.
Annie had died of a simple infection she contracted from an appendectomy at the age of twenty-six in 1913. Shortly after Annie’s death, her grieving parents boxed up her few personal belongings, including her Eastman Kodak Brownie camera and a loose collection of her pictures, and stored them in a far dark corner of their attic.
Mayme and Beth then officially introduced me to their sister Annie, her image captured in a few black-and-white group photos, as well as to their other siblings, most long since passed away. Over the years, in my teens, they’d show me other family photos recently found in small boxes or in envelopes tucked away in different closets. Mayme and Beth always put them aside for me to view, which led to more and more questions, and eventually to me recording some of their family history. The more they told me about their sister Annie, the more I started to feel I knew her – like if she had walked into the room right then, I’d be like, “Oh, hi, Annie. Want to look at pictures with me?” as if we had done that a hundred times before.
When I was twenty-two years old, Mayme and Beth gave me Annie’s camera and her collection of photos.
My great aunt Annie was born in 1886 in Enniscorthy, County Wexford, Ireland. When she was four years old, she, along with her parents, Moses and Margaret Nolan, and her younger brother Ed immigrated to the United States, settling in an Irish neighborhood in Spencer, Massachusetts. Family lore tells that neighbors loved to get Annie to talk, her heavy Irish accent reminding them of their own homes left behind on the Emerald Isle on the other side of the pond.
Eventually, her father bought a small farm nearby, raised a few milk cows and chickens, and planted potatoes in the field behind the barn as well as in his front yard. He worked for the town during the weekdays, digging water and sewer lines.
Seven more children came, two of whom, Great Aunts Mayme and Beth, lived together in their family home into their nineties. I grew up in the same neighborhood, only a few houses away from them. Their house was my second home, and the home I would eventually raise my own family in.
c. 1983. I enlisted the help of a friend to take a picture using Annie’s Brownie camera. From left to right: Beth, me, Mayme. My two dogs, Crackers and Mariah, stand in front.
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What inspired Annie into photography? Was it a studio photograph of her when she was seven years old in 1893, dressed in her white first communion gown and veil, and holding a small leatherbound Roman Catholic prayer book? Or other professional portraits of her in her teens and early twenties? Perhaps she wanted to become a professional photographer someday, too, and until that time, she’d experiment with a new amateur-level camera, the Eastman Kodak Brownie, affordable then to the average wage earner.
Looking at these pictures, to me, was more interesting than fighting imaginary pirates with a parade sword. I saw relatives from Ireland, horse-drawn carriages on streets in my hometown, people dressed in a different style of clothing, what we’d call old-fashioned today... Turned out that Annie’s box of photos really was the treasure I had fought imaginary pirates for.
Inspired by Annie’s photos, I asked my parents to buy me a camera. They bought me one of those simple, inexpensive plastic cameras, which I used off and on for a few years. In high school, I moved up to a decent, metal-housed Ricoh 35 mm camera that served me well into college. I took photos of everything – hanging out with friends, our dog, my hiking trips…
Annie never finished high school. She quit, like most of the lower economic class in Spencer, to work at the I. Prouty & Co. shoe factory. During this time, she had professional portrait photos taken of her – mostly of her in different poses, one with a tall Lincoln-type top hat, and another image of her with a parasol and sun hat.
I look at her portraits and notice her smile, a little stronger on the right side of the face than the left, just like mine. Or should I say, mine just like hers. One of my eyes opens just a tiny bit more than the other, just like hers.
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Sometimes Annie comes to me in my dreams. At least that is what I like to think, rather than it being from an overactive imagination of mine. We talk to each other – not about camera settings or the technical use of a camera, but about composition. What is it that makes the picture so much more than the image framed on paper? Is it the smile that portrays more than a smile? A glimpse into the subject’s personality?
Most of Annie’s photos are of everyday events – of her walking with friends, her mother leaving the chicken coop, her father standing with his cows, siblings goofing around.
Did Annie choose to capture these moments on film to remember, and to relive the emotions, too? Did she ever sit wrapped in blankets on a cold winter night and warm herself with good memories of times past?
I don’t know, but Annie’s pictures show me one thing: she was always trying to engage the observer with hints of the moment fixed in the images. Where did that smile come from, and where will it end up moments after the audible click of the shutter? When I study her photos, I see the first line of a story, the start of a conversation in each one of them.
Like Annie’s photos, most of mine are of everyday events – my son fishing, my daughters ice skating under the wooden bridges at Worcester’s Elm Park, the garden – nothing special to anyone else. But to me, my photos are memory aids that bring me back to those moments where I can still hear the laughter of my three daughters, each holding an apple in their teeth at the same time, or of a thousand other events that I’d probably forget about had I not had photos to remind me. Some of these moments are the basis of my written words in journals, or in essays to share with others.
If Annie were able to look at my photos today, would she recognize how similar they are to hers? I like to think so.
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Annie died much too young. Yet, her photos transcend decades, reaching out to me with the stories of her life in the early 1900s. She has given me a glimpse of other family members, most of whom died before I was born. She was, in her core, a storyteller, always looking to capture that moment in time when the seemingly mundane turns into something bigger – of what was happening beyond the frame of the photo.
I wouldn’t be where I am today as a writer, and as a photographer, if I hadn’t met my great aunt Annie – who continues nudging me to find that magical moment which begins every story.
Annie’s camera and my current camera. A hundred years of technology separates the two, but the goal remains the same: to find the story.
This personal essay was first published in the February 2025 issue of the online literary magazine The Write Launch.
