One weekend, I was walking up near the east end of Lansford, up near the railroad station, between Lansford and Nesquehoning, near the old stripping area, Fazios had a stripping area. And they had a large shed there, looked like a large garage. I used to pass it every now and then, wonder what was in it. One Saturday I just happened to open the door and I saw this beat up old car in there, and in the front seat was a mannequin - a woman mannequin. It startled me. I thought, with the way the light, back-lit, it almost looked like a real person, sitting there in the behind of this battered up car. So I opened the door and took some pictures of this mannequin sitting in the front seat of this car. I came home and developed them and I thought they were all right... The next week I went back up and the mannequin's gone. And I thought, "Oh, goodness, here I want to take some more pictures, and the thing's gone." So I get out, and roam around the area, and there I find the mannequin laying in the grass somewhere, and someone had put a hole right through the mannequin's head, a bullet hole through, I guess, they were using it for target practice. So I took some pictures there. And this happened every few weeks, I'd go back, it would either be changed, or it was in the same place, maybe I would move it. It all depends on the lighting and the conditions...Well, this was the summer, and it just so happened that it went from the summer to the fall, and the rain started to fall on it, and then the plaster started to come off a little bit, and it started to crack. And I photographed it from the fall into the winter. The snow was on it, and the weeds would fall on top of it, and wherever it fell, I would photograph it. Of course, in all this time, it was deteriorating more and more, pieces were falling off here...And then it went-when it would rain, you could almost see the tears coming down the face, the water flowing down the face, and then after the winter with the cold and all that, it had deteriorated a lot more, and it started to really crack. And then it went up into the spring, and by that time, it was starting to become less of a mannequin, just a shell of what it was. And then the following summer, someone had thrown it on the road, and I guess a car ran over it, and it almost like flattened it out. But that final picture, when it was laying in this puddle of water, it almost looked like the thing was rising, like it was rising in the air. What happened was the reflection of the sky in the water-it almost felt like the mannequin was rising...And after I made all these pictures, you know I made hundreds of them in the course of the year, the deterioration of the mannequin was almost like the deterioration of a human being. We go through various stages of our life. We're born, we live, we're young, we're young and healthy, we're strong and look good-and then we go into our middle stage, the summer of our life, the middle. And then we get to a certain point, we start to go down, the fall and the winter of our lives. And it kind of reminded me in fact - the deterioration of this mannequin, of our lives. While the mannequin did it in one season, it will take us years to do it.

DESCRIPTION:

Oral History: Unique and surprising mannequins provided Harvan an opportunity to reflect on the fragility of life

CONTRIBUTOR: 

DATE ADDED: 2010-07-30 16:06:26

COLLECTION: Mannequin, mid-1980s

ITEM TYPE: Oral History

CITATION: in Miner's Son, Miners' Photographer:, Item #442, https://chnm.gmu.edu/harvan/items/show/442 (accessed February 1, 2022).

About the Original Item

Publisher
Creator
Source
Interview with Harvan
Subject
Mannequin
Format
audio
Associated Files
alt : har-mann.mp3