“We want to collect photographs of babies and young children from anyone who has a definite link to Antigonish town and county. Our goal is to publish a collection of such photos in a book we are provisionally calling A World Family Photo Album of Multimedia Duets. We are primarily looking for pictures of babies showing a very early “artful” connection with someone else in the picture – this might be singing, cooing, dancing, miming, winking, patting, peekaboo, patty cake, etc, etc…!
Our incentive comes from reading the work of anthropologists, who have shown that we humans are “hard-wired” for art-making from the earliest moments of our lives, and that art is essential for our well-being and the very survival of our human species! Studies of infant-mother responses across cultures presents such evidence of this biological endowment for art-making in our first interactions, which has been termed “Multimedia Duets.”
Our primary criteria for selecting the photos for this album are: (1) someone included in the picture has a definite link with our community; (2) the baby is interacting/connecting with someone also in the pic, eg, mother, father, siblings, aunty, grandmom, etc; and (3) the picture evokes an immediate Ahhhhhhhhh response from the viewer!
So please send us your photos to include! You can do this by scanning (if necessary) and emailing as a JPEG, or by allowing us to have a hard copy for us to do the same… We want to stress that we will treasure these brief gifts to you as you clearly do yourselves. A limited text should accompany the photo(s) – Who? When? Where – and any short story you want to add.
One other thing we have quickly come to recognize – going over possible photos may well evoke not only happy moments but also some poignant and even sad ones… So we offer you our deepest thanks and any support you might feel in need of for your very generous participation.
Warm regards and thank you!
Dorothy and John
Dorothy Lander dorothylander1@gmail.com
John Graham-Pole john.gp@live.com