He captured his mother in a lifetime of photos
Dorothy Gilbert Friedman — a Columbus business executive, an art lover and a mother — didn’t like to be photographed.
But she set that distaste aside when her photographer son asked.
Throughout her life — and even as she lay dying of emphysema — she submitted
to his lens, often with a direct gaze that seems to challenge the camera.
James Friedman has amassed those photographs into “1,029,398 Cigarettes,” a project that started as a cautionary tale about smoking (the title is Friedman’s calculation of how many cigarettes his mother consumed in 47 years). It ended as a bonding experience.
“It became a way for us to communicate and connect,” Friedman said. “Our family did not show affection. But in the end, I would visit her almost every day, and I’d kiss her goodbye when I left. It was very bittersweet in that we both knew that time was short for her.”
Dorothy Friedman, who grew up in Bexley and died in 1990 at 66, was an executive with Gilbert Shoe Co., a family enterprise started by her father. The company sold shoes in 11 states before going out of business in 1980.
She read voraciously, recited poetry and enjoyed art and fashion. One of her son’s favorite photos resulted from his posing her outside, surrounded by books, in a sumptuous red housecoat.
“I asked her to wear that because it’s so striking,” he said.
Dorothy Friedman started smoking at age 11, and many of the photographs show her with a cigarette in hand.
Long after illness had forced her to quit, she remarked: “Even now, I would kill for a cigarette,” her son recalled.
James Friedman, a former photography professor at Ohio State University and other institutions (I wrote last year about his concentration-camp photos), took his first photo of his mother TOP: Friedman with her everpresent cigarette, in 1964
ABOVE: Friedman with her son, James, in 1989
when he was 9, using a Kodak Brownie Hawkeye camera.
Photos from “1,029,398 Cigarettes” are featured on several photography blogs and on Friedman’s website (jamesfriedmanphoto grapher.com). They were also part of an exhibit last year in Ethiopia.
When he was a child, Friedman said, his mother would sometimes cover her face when he approached with a camera. But she grew to appreciate his creative endeavors. Near the end of her life, any lingering reluctance she had about being photographed disappeared, even after illness had ravaged her body.
The project was both a gift to him and, in some ways, a solace for her, he said.
“I can only think that there may have been some comfort there for her. There was some continuity that we had done this collaborative photography for a number of years. I can only surmise that. I hope that was the case.”