As we get ready to say goodbye to this crazy year of 2016, I’m struck with how many icons of my youth I’ve watched melt away. I feel the weight of this year continuing its descent right to the very end like a giant thumb turning and rubbing out any vestige of its targeted foe. After hearing the news yesterday of my very first big screen crush, Princess Leia, that is to say, Carrie Fisher, passing…today came the dizzying news that her Mother, mid-century starlet Debbie Reynolds had succumbed to what one could only assume, a broken heart. The weight of losing her beloved Daughter simply too much for the 84-yo moviestar. We don’t normally post photographs taken by other photographers, but in my search to somehow make sense of, or perhaps at least better understand the impact of this kind of tragedy on a family I came across an uncredited photo so hauntingly beautiful…and at the same time so poignant, so touching, I had to share it. This incredible black & white image doesn’t even show faces, but its documenting of the Daughter-Mother bond is so powerful and heart-wrenching, particularly in light of what has now transpired. Chilling. The photo so perfectly demonstrates “the art of real,” and the reason that no matter how we feel about ourselves we must allow ourselves to exist in photographs. Rest in peace Debbie and Carrie…
