Connections/Blood

My name is Jackie Neale Chadwick, and I'm a photographer and digital imaging specialist for The Metropolitan Museum of Art. My topic is blood, as in family, the thread that ties me to the past.

There's always this storytelling that goes on in my family that creates this eternal life for my ancestors. The way that they were portrayed to me, they were bigger than life.

They were a force in my mind that was equally as important as any god. They became revered, they became something that I identified with and felt empowered by.

We are of Italian descent. They immigrated to the United States in the early nineteen-hundreds, and it takes such strength to do that.

And so, to know that they did it empowers me to do what I'm doing. 'Cause all the obstacles I face are so miniscule compared

to that. So when I look at the Stieglitz Steerage, I have a clear picture of what my family went

through, very often traveling back and forth to Italy.

And then when I look at Two Young Women Before a Pastry Shop at Night, I think of all the fun stories that they told me about celebration in South Philadelphia. They just have story after story of good times and

being surrounded by family, and how, at the end of the day, that's all you have.

My brother and I were really pulled back to going to Italy to visit our family. It didn't seem to occur to my mother or her brother to go back. When I went back I actually saw a landscape that looks exactly like Landscape with Goat. I saw photographs

of four generations that lived in the house that my family still occupies. And my cousins, even though I look differently than them—I'm blonde, I'm blue-eyed—they just welcomed us in their house as if we never left.

I remember when I was growing up and being at my grandmother's house, that they had lots of iconography of Catholicism and Christianity in their house. Aside from the photograph of Keely Smith and Louis Prima in the bathroom,there were plenty of

statuettes of saints and kneeling Madonnas, and Madonna and Child paintings. Their struggles were very, very difficult in that time, and I really feel they had to

keep calling on these figures for strength. The Museum is this house of tactile history and there's people who come to the Museum for research. I, on the other hand, am walking through a museum and

connecting with artworks like the Crucifix and thinking, "Well, yeah, that was over my grandmom's bed.

And this Kneeling Madonna, well, you know, I inherited that after she died, and it was on my shelf for twenty-five years

didn't match the décor. You know I don't even believe in Catholicism," but I kept it there because it was such a part of my existence.

I don't want to sound kooky at all, but I really believe in different planes of existence. When people die, the actual physical person dies, but I really feel like they are still alive, and, you know, the intellectual part of me always

rationalizes "well, that's because they're alive in our memories and these storytelling ways." But I also have always felt this presence of my ancestors around me.

That's one reason I really love photography is it sort of makes things look like they're forever going to live in that square. I almost visualize them moving around in it.

And I always wanted to capture that in my own photography, the sense of a spirit, a soul. Very often I see the work that I do as a relic.

I see it as an offering to my ancestors. I often have told myself—I call my grandmother MomMom Teresa—I say, "MomMom Teresa, I'm your eyes."

So, as I'm walking through the galleries it's not really just myself, I feel as if I have my ancestors with me. Whenever I'm behind my camera, I want to connect with them

and so I want to see what comes through me.