Smith at the intersection of Kennedy and Land

My mother was an art history major at Smith. The long-tenured professor in the department was a renaissance man, one Clarence Kennedy. In addition to his scholarly interest in Greek and Italian Renaissance sculpture, Kennedy was a photographer and a friend of Edwin Land. Land, of course, was the inventor of the Polaroid camera - but Clarence Kennedy was the man who coined the name "Polaroid" for his friend.

In 1956, my mother took a photography class with Kennedy, using Polaroid Pathfinder cameras that had been donated by Polaroid to the college.

Each week they took instant pictures, exploring various themes to capture motion or pattern or emotion. At the end of the semester, she created a portfolio: small horizontal pages in a little ring binder, a photo or two on every other sheet. That portfolio has always resided in my mother's living room, along side the albums of baby pictures, her college yearbooks, scrapbooks of family vacations, and coffee-table-type art books.

Last weekend, one of her college classmates was visiting, and in the course of the afternoon, the portfolio was brought out. They flipped through it together and talked of Smith and about two other classmates who appeared as models – one of them became an EMT, the other lives in Pennsylvania. Later that day, I took the portfolio upstairs and scanned the whole thing. If I get my act together, I may "publish" it as a Blurb book. In the meantime, here are some of my favorite pages from the portfolio.

Self Portrait:

Possibilities of the Film:

Design:

Emotion:

Motion:

Pattern: