Norma Forss Photography 1932 - 1987

Copyright © 2016 by George Forss.

ISBN:      Softcover      978-1-5144-5436-7

                eBook         978-1-5144-5435-0

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Rev. date: 02/09/2016

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There are three things I want you to know about my mother, Norma Forss:

1. She was always an uninhibited non-conformist.

2. She was always having fun in her life.

3. She had a magical charm about her like no one I have known. She had a charm that is very much like her photography.

I would say that all three of these traits are due to a great natural spirit of self-assurance she possessed. Self assurance is a great facility to have in our living experience but it is fraught with danger while it lasts. Somehow, it seems as though a person who is so free from conformity is going to get into trouble all the time. Borrowing another slang phrase from my mother’s time, you could say this pet chant phrase ... You’re gonna get yours !

My mother would just not obey the ‘rules’ in any place that she lived. It all started early for my mother when she lived with strict, dominant, parents. She had to hide her interests in photoghraphy and Jazz music. After this, her mother, died of cancer. Norma now had to live with poverty that forced her to become very street wise. Teaming up with ther brother Gino, she made do somehow and she had a lot of fun photographing people on tenemant roofs in New York’s Greenwich Village area. There is evidence in the pictures she took in those early days that shows she was a free spirit now. I have a lot of these negatives.

Isn’t Greenwhich Village where all free spirits want to go ? She was living in this area anyway, in the little Italy section, with her mother and some relatives. They were immigrants from Italy. The family name is Pardi. My mother’s relatives were split like all families can be split ... between those who were well educated conformists and those who were not.

The conformists tend to do well finanacially and the others do not. This is what being educated and being a conformist is all about. This is why we have rather strict rules in society. My mother was probably bored by all the rules of society. At the age of 13 she started her life of fun. I’m not kidding !

When I was a kid I would wake up in the morning and say ... Aw, ma ... I don’t want to go to school yoday. Without hesitation, my mother would say ... Ok. On such a day, my mother would take us to Times Square, Central Park, The Staten Island Ferry, plus many more fun things we could do.

One more thing you need to know about my mom here: She was always doing her Box Camera Photography.

Photography started for my mother while her mother, Fabiola, was still alive. Fabiola Pardi was a stately woman who was trying to raise her children properly in a new land. She actually forbade my mother from using a camera and also playing Pop Tunes Records. My mother used to hide her box camera on an outside ledge of a window in her bedroom. Her mother simply smashed a lot of her records but she managed to save some of these. Fabiola simply wanted her daughter, Norma, to get married someday and raise a family. She was old fashioned in this way. I think my mother was an early Hippie type.

I think the greatest peril my mother faced in her life was that she wasn’t very scientific. This cost her dearly. This is a strange thing to describe because her portraits actually defy science. I cannot determine scientifically how my mother’s photogrpahy is so scientifically astute. I also did not know that my mother’s pictures were so great. The reason for this is I just did not study all of my mother’s photography until ten years after her death. I just figured that I already seen her best work. I now find that my mother has about 1000 negatives of great pictures she took.

I don’t know why I reasoned this way. I know I have had unusual luck in my picture taking, or I knew to wait on my subjects until I saw a great picture before me. Many photographers shoot multiple images knowing that by sheer luck they will find a few good ones. My mother doesn’t have any lucky shots ... all of them are good ! What I now know is that almost all of my mother’s pictures are the equal of great art posing. This is truly amazing to me. Here is another slang-like phrase I can use here ... Oh yeah, prove it !

Here’s the proof. Look at all of the images in this book. Notice how each subject is so beautifully postured with very natural-like facial expressions ... expressions that show the subjects natural exuberance ... that are the equal of the best art of portraiture. Exuberance ? Yes.

I did not know how great my mother’s photography was until a few months before I started this book. I knew she had some great images. The people at Time and Life knew how good her work is. They became aware of her portaits after I got discovered for my own photography. I was showing some of my mother’s portraits around and I just assumed that I had all the ‘good ones’. Mostly, her movie star portraits intrigued the Time and Life people.

My mother has about 125 movie star negatives and only about 25 of these are so special ... as special as her portraits of children. I know she was shooting for luck with these ... and with the skill of an astute photographer ... knowing when to make her photographic eposure on film. She could not pose a Movie Star for an hour or so the way she did with her portraits of children to make these portraits so special. The Stars that she captured so well were charmed by her presence though ... my mom with a mere Box Camera ... that they naturally had just the right kind of look about them that my mother wanted. My mother was like a predator with her camera. She could see quickly and catch a wanted perfect expression.

Look at the facial expressions of these, they are as good as her portraits of children. You can see this in the best portraits she did of the stars. With some other stars she missed the focus or that her quick picture taking did not work.

I’m afraid that I made the automatic assumption that most of her picture taking was like this ... that she had many misses. How she knew the focus and her expert use of her flash bulbs is a mystery to me. She might have missed with her the Stars, but with children, never.

A Box Camera does not have variable focus. Some of them will focus at about 35 feet. Another one I tried focused at about 15 feet. I do remember that my mother used some diopter lenses that are designed to be held in front of a Box Camera lens to change the focus ... to make the camera focus closer.

The thing is that I did not know how great all her pictures of children were until recently, a few years after my mom died. Only now am I exploring hundreds of her negatives and finding how great her portraits are. I am exploring the pictures that my mother took from 1932 until 1987.

Another thing that is a hindrance to my discovering my mother’s photography is the awful condition of hundreds of my mom’s negatives. They were all stored in cardboard boxes and were soiled by cat piss fumes and such ! I am being blunt but you will understand when you read further. Like, uh ... my mother had 27 cats at one point in her life ... when we lived in Brooklyn, NY. Some of her negatives are stuck together. I can’t even rescue these. At least not yet. If I need to I can submerge them in a soak of water. This is the way that negatives are processed ... in water mixed with chemicals.

One thing that caused this to happen was when we had a terrible fire in the property next door to us, an illegal garage run by a few Haitian immigrants. The Haitian people we knew were amazingly indusrious people who bought the property at a low price with the proviso that they would restore the property. This they did and made a taxi service and repair shop business out of this property. There was a very long garage on this property that always had a few cars in a row inside it.

Well,one night one of the cars blew up. This happened about 4 a.m. and I saw a flume of fire shooting up through the roof. Next, I saw another car explode; then another. I think three cars were on fire with three plumes shooting up through this garage’s roof.

Now we had to get out of our building fast. I went to check on my mother and the cats but they were already were already gone. They were all over the yard. My mother was outside in the yard. I was rushing to rescue her when I heard her yelling outside ... Get the dog !

We had a tall skinny whippet dog that was frozen in shock in my upstairs apartment. I had a WW II English gas mask hanging in my staircase wall for just such an occasion. I got to the dog and had to carry him bodily out of the building.

As I was coming down the stairs the firemen were coming up. They told me my building was going to be engulfed in flames in about five minutes. I got the dog out and then I ran in the building again to retrieve my negatives. The firemen didn’t stop me. With my gas mask on they may have thought I was one of them for a few seconds when I ran up the stairs.

I had just been discovered and presented to the world as a great photographer by David Douglas Duncan and I had to have my negatives !

Did I rescue my mother’s negatives ? No. Here is another slang phrase ... Who knew ?

I couldn’t rescue my mother’s negatives because they were all over the place in various boxes; some were in a metal breadbox.

Now my mother was outside praying aloud that the building would not go up in flames. It did not ! The firemen were able to contain the fires next door after all. They also flooded our place with water. The water was everywhere and it did a lot of damage. Our walls were blackened from the smoke of the fires.

Yeah ... who knew ?

Who knew that my mother had such great images to herald to the world ? It is puzzling to me now to know the possible value of my mother’s work after all the years that my mother had been taking pictures with her box cameras. I am really wondering ... What’s going on here ?… to put my thinking in a slang phrase again.

Why did my mother persist in taking