Designed by Lawrence Wolfson
144 pages, 69 black and white photographs, paperback
Published in 2023 by Working Assumptions
This book is a chronological series of father/daughter self-portraits by photographer Geoffrey Biddle. It begins with Eve's birth and concludes twenty-two years later after the death from cancer of his wife and her mother, artist Mary Ann Unger. Biddle writes directly to Eve in brief accompanying texts that illuminate sweet, happy details of their lives and acknowledge the emotional strain of Unger’s diagnosis and long battle to stay alive. Eve and Me was conceived as a gift from father to daughter, testimony to their shared experience and singular bond. It traverses their closest years, from city playgrounds to country fields, without and within the shadow of illness and loss. “I put myself on both sides of Eve and Me. Telling our story this way gave me clarity and a measure of control that catastrophic illness and daily parenting withhold.” By the end of this companion volume to Biddle's memoir Rock In A Landslide, the circle of life issues new chapters when both Eve and her father find love and he hints at a future with “our blended family at one table....and I get to take pictures."
1982 Lenox Hill Hospital, New York City
You were in Mom’s belly with one leg down and one foot tucked behind your neck, so you had to be delivered by C-section. Your mom was still under anesthesia when a nurse brought you out to me. I set my camera on a windowsill and triggered the “vanity switch,” the self-timer that marked the beginning of our life together.
I had just shaved off my beard to mark your arrival with a fresh face. You can see the pale skin where my whiskers were.
1985 Three dish towels and a paper bag, New York City
You’re standing on the counter in the kitchen of the loft. The seedlings in cups are for the garden we were starting in the country.
This was the year Mom was diagnosed with breast cancer.
1987 Mom’s entourage, Princeton, New Jersey
Even though she’d had cancer treatment, Mary Ann Unger was a dynamo. She started competing for public art projects and won a commission to make a sculpture for a new shopping mall in Princeton. You and I are in a motel room dressed up for the opening ceremony.
The brightly painted sculpture was modular, with parts up to twenty feet tall. It quickly became a landmark and wedding photographers brought couples to stand in front of it for their portraits. But the mall fell on hard times after a couple of years and the sculpture was removed and disappeared.
1989 Three heads in a row, Wallkill, New York
Mom found a Franklin stove at an antiques barn in Maine that cost only seventy-five dollars. We hauled it to the country house in the back of the van, and with it came a cascade of unanticipated expenses. We had to put in a stone hearth for fire safety and reinforce the floor to carry all that weight. When the chimney sweep came to hook it up, he discovered that our one flue was already venting the furnace, so we had to install another.
But the stove proved to be efficient and a staple for cold winter nights. The new flue had a good draw and there was plenty of wood. We would hole up in the toasty living room and play cards, listen to music, and read aloud, including a story set not far from Wallkill, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
1994 Coney Island, New York City
We are at the beach with two daughters from my father’s half brother’s first of three marriages. My side of the family is large and loosely connected, full of divorce, remarriage, and Biddles marrying Biddles. It’s the opposite on your mom’s side, where there remains just Mary Ann’s surviving brother and his family. You take the initiative to honor these connections and keep in touch with everyone.
1996 Road trip, Four Corners
Grandma Anne may have crowned herself Queen of Vacations, but your mom had ideas too and decided that the three of us would fly to the Four Corners region and travel around for six weeks. We are posed on a road that’s a tiny squiggly line on a map, going north from New Mexico into Colorado. Mom’s remission maintenance drugs made her skin hypersensitive to the burning Southwest sun. She’d sewn elastic into the wrists of my white cotton photo gloves to protect her hands.
1998 Dyeing your hair with Mom, New York City
The end of this year was brutal, with diapers, bedsores, opioids and loss of speech. It’s extraordinary to remember all that and look at this scene from just a few months before. Even with what was coming, your mom cared about getting the henna color right—hints of the focus and intensity she brought to making her art.
1999 On the Catskill Aqueduct, near New Paltz, New York
When we went to the country place, we took the same walks, lit the same fires, and cooked the same meals, but it was so different without Mom. Her presence was everywhere.