The time and setting of Jona Frank’s childhood would look familiar to millions of Americans: the 1970s, an ordinary suburban house in a middle-class New Jersey neighborhood. But alongside the recognizeable decor, clothing and activities depicted in Frank’s photographic memoir Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined (2020) is a very specific and individual story. It’s a portrait of the artist as a young woman bewildered by her mother’s moods — troubling moods that alternate between an inchoate feeling of despair and misdirected aggression.
In the book, cinematically staged photographs recreate the artist’s fraught memories of her childhood and teenage years alongside short bursts of text. In You Are Not Enough, Frank’s solo show at San Francisco’s EUQINOM Gallery, the memoir is represented by 13 large-scale prints, needlepoint “drawings” and a custom-made replica of a suburban tract home similar to the one she grew up in.
At the top of the house’s miniature chimney, a viewfinder provides access to a slideshow — a carousel of changing imagery that taps into both nostalgia and nightmares. Frank, who emailed me after we spoke on the phone for this story, pointed out that the house has no door knobs. You can’t return to your childhood, she noted, but you also can’t leave it behind.
That tract home is the focal point of the exhibit and an object within photographs depicting Frank’s origin story. In Homage to Louise B., a figure places the model on their head — a visual metaphor for the potential mental burden of one’s childhood. For the artist, that weight is clearly stated in the exhibition title, the overriding message Frank’s mother Rose inscribed on her daughter’s psyche. Viewers can catch significant glimpses of their dynamic without reading the compelling coming-of-age story in Cherry Hill, but the memoir enhances the meaning of each photograph hanging on the gallery walls.
Hired actors play the photographer at various stages of her girlhood; at the dramatic center of the series, the actress Laura Dern plays Rose. Disguised in a brown wig, Dern evokes the increasingly frayed internal life of a wife and mother. Though largely chronological, neither the book nor the show hinges on a strict sense of plotting. Frank shot these heightened photographs with an anamorphic CinemaScope lens attached to a high-resolution digital camera. She explained her approach in a 2022 catalog essay, writing that the format “creates a vignette that encourages the feeling of ‘looking in’ while visually accentuating the imperfection of memory.”
Frank builds suspense by revisiting key moments in her own dawning consciousness. The emotional intensity ramps up, page by page and photograph by photograph, as soon as mother and daughter appear in matching outfits and matching smiles. (Those smiles subsequently dissolve on both faces.)
