Mrs. Carmella is one of Patrick’s favorite subjects to photograph. As he snaps away, I try to get the stories flowing. It’s not that she’s unwilling to tell them. It’s just that she’s nearly 90, and she repeats herself. We have to gently coax the stories from her faded memory. It helps that she doesn’t mind being told that she’s repeating herself. Sometimes it is through this repeating process, though, that she can discover some part of the story that has alluded her for years. It’s at this point that time can get a little bit tricky. She sometimes thinks that things are closer to her in time than they actually are. The girl in kindergarten who gave her graham crackers for the first time, for example, is very near to her heart, and she tells the story like it was yesterday.
