“Dad’s most meaningful gamble in his lifetime was buying a 130 acre dairy farm, in Gotham, Maine,” writes Melonie Bennett (born 1969) in her arresting debut, Holy Cow!. Drawn from two decades’ of work taken between 1990 and 2011, Bennett captures the dramas, dancing, dogs and drunken exploits of a family in full flow, a madcap album documenting everything from Christmases and pregnancies to bike crashes and bee stings. “I sometimes wonder how we all get through this soap opera that is our life,” wrote the poet Frank O’Hara, a line suggesting something of the routine chaos of the Bennett farm, the stresses and the celebrations, the losses and the laughter.
The looming threat of health concerns and economic hardship are never far from Bennett’s world
“I was always looking for what could be described as the absurd and the unexpected,” notes Bennett, who worked as an assistant to photographer Judy Glickman for more than 30 years. “I love to point things out that I can’t believe are happening in front of me and share them. Look at this! Can you believe that? What were they thinking?” The photographs in Holy Cow! are stuffed with such absurdity, each scene hazy with the buzz of a few beers, whether reliving Mechanical Bull Night at the Memory Lane Music Hall or one brother removing stitches from the eyebrow of another with a pair of toenail clippers.
‘Laughing and bewildered’
While there is plenty of horsing around in these pictures—not least at “Chrissy’s X-rated Bachelorette” and “Mary’s Naughty Toy Party”—the looming threat of punch-ups, health concerns and economic hardship are never far from Bennett’s world. One picture shows a freshly KO’d friend sprawled flat out on the asphalt. Another sees her father in the hospital recovering from an operation to replace both of his knees, the inevitable consequence of “repetitive work on the farm”.
Bennett’s photographs are interspersed with anecdotes related by her brother, Merritt, outlandish tales of house fires and outrunning the cops that would never fail to leave the family both “laughing and bewildered”.
These contradictory strains of laughter and bewilderment are clear within the photographs. Bennett’s pictures fizz with moments of hilarity, documenting endless pranks and slapstick: kids setting off fireworks and spraying relatives with hosepipes; beer bellies placed proudly either side of a young woman, nine months pregnant. What is more, the characters in Bennett’s photographs are frequently in costume—Batman outfits, KISS make-up, a rescue dog in cowboy boots—a sense of non-stop, delirious theatricality where no gag is off-limits. One picture shows Bennett’s nephews playing cards wearing their auntie’s bras, just one of several instances of cross-dressing and dressing up that gesture to the photographs of Diane Arbus.
An ode to Bennett’s father
“Humour and irony were commodities worth more than anything in my household,” writes Bennett, “a reprieve from the daunting heaviness” of the family’s financial troubles and her father’s alcoholism, to say nothing of his “severe thyroid condition, which… frankly, caused him to behave crazy”. While Holy Cow! is dedicated to her mother—conspicuously absent from the work itself—the publication steadily unfolds into an ode to Bennett’s father, Fred. His eccentricity and playfulness are obvious, whether brandishing the torch taped to his air rifle to help fend off invading skunks, or pictured crossing foam swords with his grandson in the kitchen; readying himself to thwack a dangling piñata or, in one image, appearing topless in the false nose, fake moustache and glasses of a plastic Groucho Marx disguise. Nevertheless, despite his comedy credentials, Holy Cow! hints at a story of both physical and cognitive decline, transforming Bennett’s photographs into a moving elegy not only to her father but to the period the work depicts, a sober celebration of “the ordinary improbability that occurs / over and over,” writes poet Hayden Carruth, “the stupendousness / of life”.
Monique Instigating the First Water Fight of the Season (1993) © the artist
Holy Cow! reveals what feels like an essential truth, that choosing to take photographs is an act of serious devotion, to family and friends and objects, to places and homes, to pets, a favourite car or jacket, to small moments of beauty, even gentleness and love. Bennett ends her book with a quotation from Marilyn Monroe, serving as both the summary of and mantra for a well-lived life: “Imperfection is beauty, madness is genius, and it’s better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.”
- Melonie Bennett, Holy Cow!, GOST Books, 176pp, 66 b/w illus., £40 (hb), published UK/EU 14 May and US June
- Rowland Bagnall is a writer and poet
