class from working-class to middle-class through her education.

There was a
great rival there between the two sisters my aunt Helen was often
characterised as a beautiful one and my mother as a clever one. I remember
my aunt Helen always telling me mother that she should dress smart and my
mother always calling aunt Helen silly.

I've chosen to specific pictures of my mother to talk about one of them my

mother wears a fairly sexy nightgown while she sits on her dental chair. This
is a very awkward picture since my mother sits in the middle in the dental
chair as the patient whereas she was the dentist. Moreover she is wearing a
nightgown (a most inappropriate piece of clothing for such a professional
environment). She does not look at the lens. She avoids the lens
systematically, because she needs glasses to see thus she turns away from
looking at the lens since she tries to control her appearance on film otherwise
her eyes appear to be out of focus.

This is a photograph in which my mother ―performs‖ what is considered a very

feminine posture. She is very apparently performing her femininity. Through
the pose, the clothing, the avoiding of the lens, she performs herself in the
image. Even though in her work environment; there is a necessity for her to
appear beautiful that is greater than for her to appear professional. It is also
important to see that this is my mother performing for the eyes of my father.
My father is the photographer of this image, which explains the intimacy of the
picture. The way in which my father has framed this picture is characteristic of
how he desired to create the image of my mother and give the picture
glamour and mum‘s persona a movie star quality. My mother is centrally
framed and she has a machine that looks like a camera over her head. It is a
plain x-ray machine. I'm mentioning this because I believe that is not
incidental that my father has included in the frame objects that have to do with
visual communication, objects that in fact make images. He was very well
aware as a person and a photographer that TVs, and cameras, are very