Show & Tell

This was required by my college photography class. After study, quiz and explanation in class with the professor, the book to my surprise was an excellent observation by an 8 year old boy.

I received Show and Tell as a Father's Day gift from my daughter, a recent student of Thomas Roma's at Barnard, and it is a wonderful book. We inhabit a world of barriers and skepticism, even cynicism, and I must confess that at first I too was skeptical of the notion of father-and-child collaboration. But in a few pages there was no doubt that Giancarlo's voice was indeed that of an eight- or nine-year-old juxtaposed with Thomas' sometimes stark black and white photography. By that time I realized that something else was happening that is rare, a great gift. Giancarlo's words cut through the barriers of my skepticism and my adult, expectation-based way of seeing to open my eyes to the real physical and human content of his father's photographic compositions. It is impossible to know how much direction Thomas gave to Giancarlo in framing the verbal exercises, yet each one seems just right, it is what it is, it opens the photograph, and ultimately is in no way just an exercise. It is clear Thomas chose content that would be real and accessible to Giancarlo, and in any case I am grateful for the collaboration, for the invitation to see, and for the wonderful irony that in this collaboration I found my identification more with the boy than with his father.