Verbal Description: Mary Manning, His Estate, 2022

Narrator: His Estate is a color photograph depicting two other printed horizontal photographs whose dimensions are like those found in family albums. They are pictured lying on a grayish-white background surface, stacked vertically one on top of the other. The work of art on view here is 30 inches tall and 20 inches wide. The two photographs that it reproduces were taken by Mary Manning’s father, Mike, who passed away from COVID-19 in 2020. Manning used their father’s old 35mm camera to re-photograph the two original images, which sit off-center within the photograph’s frame—they are slightly slanted to the left. There is more white space on the bottom than there is on the top. In the print, the photographs do not lie perfectly flat on the surface they are resting on. Thin shadows appear around the edges of the photographs. The lifted corners of the photographs indicate that someone has held them.

Both photographs show a bouquet of wildflowers, pictured from different angles against a backdrop of blurry trees. The bundle has two flowers with round white petals and yellow centers, surrounded by several bunches of smaller yellow and pastel purple-pink flowers, as well as several green leaves. Mary Manning recalls that, while on drives with their father, he would often pull over to take photographs of flowers he had spotted on the side of the road. He likely captured these images in a similar manner. The mix of flowers, in addition to their small size and sparse arrangement, implies that they were handpicked by Mike. While there is no hand visible in the photos, the composition suggests that Mike assembled the bouquet and held it up to the light, as the flowers are seemingly suspended against a woodsy background. The image is tinted with a warm golden hue from the late afternoon sun. 

The impromptu, everyday nature of these photographs reveals Mike’s inclination to capture the beauty of the ordinary. Traces of his presence are interspersed throughout these photographs. Similarly, Manning’s impulse to re-photograph these particular images in the aftermath of their father’s death is an act of remembering him through everyday objects and mementos. Manning’s use of their father’s camera only adds to the sense that they are capturing the world through their father’s lens.