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Book: Silver Screen by Tama Hochbaum published by Daylight

Preview
Tama Hochbaum‘s mother came of age in the 1930s during the Golden Age of the Silver Screen. As a young woman, one of her favorite pastimes was going to the movies. During the last years of her life as she suffered from increasingly poor health with the onset of Alzheimer’s, she found great comfort in watching re-broadcasts of the movies of her youth. Hochbaum cared for her mother with daily phone calls and visits as often as she could. Mother and daughter stayed connected by watching movies simultaneously on The Turner Classic Movies station that was on Channel 67 in both their neighborhoods Hochbaum’s in North Carolina, her mother’s in New York.
 
After her mother passed away in February 2012, Hochbaum conceived the idea for Silver Screen published by Daylight, a loving tribute to her mother and the films and Hollywood legends that gave her joy. She describes the project as “an act of both love and loss, a struggle to hold on to memory and an understanding of the futility of such a struggle, a willingness to let memory fade.”
Over two years, Hochbaum immersed herself in the movies that her mother loved. Using her iPhone, she grabbed screenshots off her television running the old classic movies. Her shimmering subjects are caught in real time as the movie is playing, memorializing them in tight close-up. The images captured from her home TV screen emit a haunting luminosity and an ethereal quality that is magical and mesmerizing. Hochbaum moves in close to the screen to make her shots, distorting the images, accentuating and exaggerating the actress’s eyes, cheekbones, mouth, and face in pixelated, fractured detail. 

Silver Screen captures scenes from such classic cinema as Camille starring Greta Garbo (her mother’s favorite movie), Jezebel featuring Bette Davis (which Hochbaum remembers watching with her mother), Lauren Bacall in Key Largo, Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, and Marlon Brandon in On the Waterfront. The series takes the form of both single images and grids of contiguous shots of unfolding scenes. In a companion series, Hochbaum captures the dancers of the Silver Screen. 
 
Hochbaum traces the trajectory of her mother’s legacy using stacked technologies: celluloid transmitted via broadcast and rendered digitally, the silver screen of her mother’s youth, the TV screen of Hochbaum’s own coming-of-age, and the ubiquitous iPhone screen of her daughter’s generation. In Silver Screen, Hochbaum reverently explores memory, attachment and loss with images that are simple, iconic and strangely current.

BOOK
Silver Screen
Photographs by Tama Hochbaum
Publisher:  Daylight
ISBN: 9781942084013
Hardcover
10 X 8 IN.
124 Pgs, Illustrated throughout
$45.00 US.
 

http://daylightbooks.org
http://www.tamahochbaum.com

 

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