I lied.
My grandmother asked if I wanted to take their portrait, and I said yes. It’s not that I didn’t like my grandparents; it’s that I don’t take portraits of strangers. Standing at the front door, I realized it was the first time I had returned to their home in Missouri in thirty years. I brought with me a camera, a tripod, and an awareness of why I didn’t know the two individuals living in the house.
Their sons and daughters, twelve in total, had varied levels of cold, distant relationships with them, decades of frost that accumulated and seeped into the foundations of the family. My mother’s relationship with her father was particularly embittered; the result was an absence of any relationship between me and my maternal grandparents.
Growing up, my mother hid her anger well. The only hint I had of animosity was that we barely saw anyone. Visits were infrequent, rushed, and always predicated on a critical mass of extended family to buffer the interactions between her and my grandparents. Over time, the reasons for the distance were given to me, though in such broken cadence that it was difficult to keep track of the larger narrative. The essence of the story was familiar: a marriage based on an affair. The details, however, formed a daytime soap plot. Its climax was that, overnight, my grandfather installed a new family matriarch, a woman I grew up knowing as my grandmother.
My mother was still a young girl when the home she grew up in turned thorny, headed by two individuals who revealed a cruel ease in hurting the people they were expected to protect. Criticism, resentment, and doubt were substituted for love and warmth. This was a family with deception at its core. I understand now, as an adult, why my mother wanted to keep us away. But there I was, standing cautiously at the open door.
I smiled. My grandmother smiled. Each of us looked through the other. After a perfunctory hug hello, she caught me off guard by asking me to make a portrait of them. So I lied, saying that I wanted to. It wasn’t a complete falsehood—I did want to capture them, but not in the way she thought. I had come that day for a different purpose. I didn’t know them as people, but I did know the house, the site of concentrated childhood memories. The polar-white fur rug in their bedroom suite, the permanently installed kids’ table in the dining room, the always-empty freezer chest, the mirrored walls in a kid’s bedroom, the fraying nylon ferns everywhere—these spoke more than any formal portrait I could make. The house, its rooms, and the memories created in them were what I would use to understand these strangers, my grandparents.
The house, its rooms, and the memories created in them were what I would use to understand these strangers, my grandparents.
Traveling across Missouri, rural towns like Paris, Auxvasse, Prairie Home, Santa Fe, Cairo, Dresden, and Novelty are names of interest, borrowed or otherwise, and suggestive of potential beyond their reality. My grandfather was born in one of these: Glasgow. I was told as a child that he was employed as an engineer, which wasn’t exactly true. He was a businessman, advancing from McDonnell Douglas to a commercial HVAC company to a large plastics factory, until he retired with the sort of wealth I suppose he always knew was possible. It’s an inspiring trajectory, considering he never finished high school.
In the basement of the house, behind a door I was never permitted to enter as a child, was my grandfather’s workroom. On the day of my visit, I was finally allowed in. Triangles of varying sizes hung on the walls, a constellation of angles. I saw the tools of his trade—straightedges, cutters, spring-loaded dividers, oversized papers—arranged in a collection of still lifes that defined a history.
The office chair was pulled out slightly from the desk, its vinyl padding cracked from years of use, though only on one corner. I imagined how a weighted posture might have informed his drawings. Was he right-handed like me? Was this the chair he sat in as he drafted sketches? What else was I not told about his real passion: making things?
Every draftsman’s implement I discovered in his workroom held a secret geometry, a language that spoke of precision, scribing paths that pointed towards opportunity. These were tools for shaping the world as much as shaping my grandfather himself. Photographing his workroom, I thought about his path. Though on paper he was a businessman, he was an engineer at heart, and in the ninety-nine years of his lifetime, it turns out he engineered his way into the American Dream.
On October 17, 1978, he was granted US Patent 4,120,446: “A newspaper delivery receptacle or tube having a bottom, sides and a top, closed at one end constituting its back end and open at its front end.”
His workroom held a blueprint of resilience—a testament to self-made success. The patent he was granted — for the kind of plastic newspaper box under every suburban mailbox in America — granted him wealth. Wealth based on the profound act of making. As an artist and a creator, I felt kinship for someone I barely knew. This was an inherent relationship forged from potential energy. Potential in the ideas and expressions he privately worked out on paper within these four walls. Potential for a relationship between grandfather and grandson, who might have had more in common than either of us realized.
My brother and I struggled to stay awake in the back seat of my parents’ Plymouth Horizon as we returned home from my grandparents’ house after an exhausting night. The winter sun had set hours ago. My parents drove us past the tiny beige house I was born in, past the towering silos that filled the air with a sweet, earthy scent of soybeans, past the old A. P. Green firebrick factory, a marker that we had finally left Mexico, Missouri.
It was Christmas Eve, one of the few family events we attended. My mother’s eleven siblings and their families filled the house to perform a few hours of “Life Magazine: Holiday Edition.” Our family may have come together to celebrate Christmas, but being in a house with so many people I didn’t know underscored the distance between me and everyone else. Minutes after stepping into the chaos, I would disappear.
My grandparents were not warm people. Neither played games with me, nor asked questions about what I wanted to be when I grew up. Since the rest of the family was so alien to me, in my grandparents’ home, I was limited to the periphery of every activity. Without anyone to talk to, I would explore. The holiday gifted me a few hours of time with the house that seemed to contain as many secrets as the family itself.
Built by my grandfather in 1959, the fifty-five-hundred-square-foot house was divided into three floors, each with its own rules of engagement. The top floor, all kids’ bedrooms, was technically off-limits, making it a thrill to sneak up the stairs and steal glances of how my aunts and uncles slept when they were my age. Along the way, I would inch past their formal portraits, a procession of middle-distance stares and dated hairstyles. My mother and her sister, close in age and bond, looked like identical twins in their portraits. I wondered which of the top-floor bedrooms they found safety in together, perhaps sitting cross-legged, confiding feelings about crushes, homework, or family drama.
Downstairs, on the main level, was a seldom-used formal dining room, anchored by a monstrosity of a crystal chandelier and a lacquered table that seated sixteen. On Christmas Eve, its entire surface was covered with a high-low landscape of homemade dishes that family members would bring, mixed with trays of specialty foods my grandmother had catered. I filled my plate with Lit’l Smokies, shrimp cocktail, and Lofthouse cookies, buying time until we could finally open presents and go home.
Gift giving was an exercise in fine-tuning the mechanics of celebrating Christmas in such a large family. Each fall, my grandparents would write the name of each family member on a slip of paper and select pairs from the always-growing pool of gift givers and receivers. My brother and I would await the phone call from my grandmother announcing which random, distant family member we’d be expected to purchase a thoughtful gift for. Christmas, now a wet rag of a holiday, twisted tight, distilling the gift giving tradition into an evening of impersonal transactions. The tree was annually installed in front of the living room’s bay windows, a large enough setting to contain the sprawl of presents. From the outside, it must have created a picturesque scene; from the inside, it was an amphitheater of excess.
Across from the tree sat a polished white Roland player piano, its phantom automatic keys responding to music no one could hear through the din of Christmas chatter. It creeped me out. The seat in front of the piano could fit two—I imagined my grandmother sitting next to my mother, close enough so their knees could touch, close enough for her to guide her stepdaughter’s hand toward the correct keys, close enough, perhaps, for a moment of trust to be forged.
The house had two full kitchens, one of which was attached to a basement den reserved for the generation just before mine. That kitchen was used for all-evening access to adult substances. Budweiser for the boys, Bartles & Jaymes for the girls, Marlboro Gold cartons passed secretly while they played table tennis, watched reruns of football games, and avoided the parents upstairs. The only reason I would head down there was to play with a bizarre electronic organ that gathered dust in the corner. It had countless colored rocking buttons that enabled approximations of real sounds. The cleverest sound in its catalog, though, was “On.” At the organ’s base was a comically large switch, and with relish I would kick it, causing a bass-heavy shudder of electricity to reverberate throughout the basement. After four seconds of much-craved attention, I could slink away into a different room.
Off the den was the laundry room, commercially sized to accommodate the household staff, painted a sickly pastel blue that reminded me of Mylanta. Embedded in the walls was a labyrinth of chutes, shuttling five bedrooms’ worth of laundry directly to the laundry room to be washed by one of the housekeepers. My brother and I would pass time by tossing vending-machine bouncy balls into the chutes to audibly trace their trajectories as they ricocheted down two flights of ductwork. The day of my visit, I saw a collection of my grandfather’s cotton coveralls hanging at the room’s entrance, all nearly identical, pressed for the week ahead. I imagine my grandmother meeting her future husband, impressed with his daily uniform.
The place I visited on Christmas Eve was neither house nor home—it was a museum, with lives on display that I could only observe. It was a place where the concept of “home” felt as foreign as the relatives whose names I could never remember. I could smile as I unwrapped presents, stuff myself silly with fancy foods, all under a cliché of “Christmas at Grandma and Grandpa’s”—yet the sense of belonging eluded me, always hidden behind a door for which there was no key.
I’ll admit now that, amid the alienation, there was a strange comfort in the rituals, and to this day, I maintain a nostalgia for this family that I didn’t feel part of. It’s a testament to the complex nature of family, where even those who feel out of place somehow fit into a broader narrative. Memories of Christmas Eve are my most potent snapshots, and perhaps it is in the spaces between these snapshots where truths reside—in the unspoken, the unseen, and the unknown.
Each photograph I made was a question asked. These were conversations initiated with the tangible, seeking understanding of how things such as a simple bar of green soap can intersect with ideas such as worth, doubt, or love. I had my memories, but my camera allowed me to explore connections without the barrier of distance, or through a pervasive filter of what I knew about the family’s deceptions. While the images I made described one truth—the stark reality of the house and its contents—they masked another: emotional truth.
Perhaps the images, too, are lies?
The front yard, bathed in soft hues of sunlight and the promise of spring, held its secrets well. Pastel eggs were embedded in the clover, peeking out from behind the broad dandelion leaves and tufts of soft grass. It was Easter Sunday, the other holiday that brought the extended family to the house, with aunts, uncles, nieces, and nephews spilled out onto the yards, driveways, and the back patio to hunt for those eggs. It was only when I was older that I learned that other grandparents didn’t stuff money into them. For my grandparents, lottery tickets, twenties, and the occasional hundred-dollar bill replaced candy as the currency of affection.
I remember once taking a chance at hunting alone near the end of the long driveway, delighting at the reward of a twenty-dollar egg. At the age of eight, it was more money than I had ever had to myself. With an exhale that admitted a small defeat, my mother nodded when I asked if I could keep it, an early clue about the power of wealth. This family’s bonds were strengthened not by shared moments but by shared friction. Money was used as a preverse tool to maintain relationships and appearances. More than anything, my grandparents seemed to be in the business of having kids. Each transaction was a contract to overlook the past—tacit agreements to the question “See, aren’t we nice people?”
Back inside the house, the Jenn-Air coil stovetop hummed to life, bright red, allowing my uncles to light their cigarettes before stepping out onto the patio to grill lunch. The walls of the house seemed capable of expanding in the warmer months. The firebrick patio was just large enough to fit the number of folding tables required for such a large gathering. At all these events, the grandkids were relegated to the kids’ table, always set up in a separate zone on the patio.
My aunts and uncles were veterans of our family system. The younger ones—naive and tired from an afternoon hunting for money—clung to the comfort of their table, junior associates in the business of family politics.
“I thought you might need a coat.”
Did my grandmother assume my coat was inadequate? Or worse: did she think the coat my mother packed was the only one I owned? My parents were both hardworking providers, but we were a solidly lower-middle-class family. My grandmother’s statement stung in its implicit indictment of their inadequacy.
This was one of the few times my brother and I stayed overnight at the house, and only because my grandmother had requested she take us back-to-school shopping. In the morning, we sat in the kitchen, eating a breakfast of unfamiliar cereals. My grandmother asked us if we’d finally like to leave for a day of shopping together. Despite the tightness in the pits of our stomachs, we said yes. She had us wait outside while she extracted the Cadillac, pulled it into the circular driveway, and rolled down the window. Her diamond earrings sparkled in the morning light. She requested that we sit in the back seat, which was ideal because I didn’t have much to talk about either.
A drop of bright blood pooled at the base of the thumbnail I was picking at. A flush formed on my cheeks, embarrassment from feeling as vulnerable in that car as the pure white leather of its seats. I prayed for a Band-Aid. The relationship between my mother and my grandparents cast a long shadow, creating a negative space where warmth and connection should have been, a reminder that lineage does not ensure closeness.
The Cadillac, a symbol of the life my grandmother was handed—one so starkly different from mine—felt like a cherry-red vessel navigating the vast sea between our worlds. I can still see her from back seat as we drove a silent forty-five-minute trip to the mall, the rearview mirror reflecting not what was, but what might have been.
I couldn’t have known that shortly after the day of my visit, both of my grandparents would die. I had, in fact, made the final portraits of their lives. These were two individuals I never got to know, perhaps never wanted to, and now never will. Objects, colors, and textures I reveal in the photographs add up to the closest sense of my grandparents—and what they considered home—that I will ever be able to access. In the absence of personal connection, the house held their truths.
Making photographs of a place holding so many complex memories—in one sense, a practice of preservation—was ultimately a realization of loss. I wonder about the moments that were never created, the stories that were never shared, the truths that were too fragile to survive.
The legacy of lies is a complex inheritance. It demands introspection and, at times, confrontation. I knew that the camera in my hand was a tool of both revelation and concealment. I pointed it at familiar scenes, soothing me just like the nostalgic memories of those scenes. What didn’t I capture? And why? As a photographer, I’m forced to think about silent omissions, manipulations of reality, questions of truth. These sound a lot like my family story. With each frame, I sought to uncover layers of life unknown to me that had unfolded in this space. Yet, in doing so, did I perpetuate the deceit I sought to escape?
In the fabric of my grandparents’ lives, lies were the threads that both colored and concealed. Fictions told and retold until they took on a life of their own, leaving me to navigate a maze of half-truths. Perhaps, in my journey through a murky past, I’ve found not only the origins of my family’s secrets but also the seeds of truth about my relationship to that home, even if it’s one that took thirty years and a day with a camera to realize.
Erik Mace is a visual artist based in Asheville, North Carolina, who combines photography, graphic design, and book arts into a singular tool of inquiry. In 2024, Mace was named the Photography Artist in Residence at The Bascom: A Center for the Visual Arts. He received his BFA in Visual Communications from Washington University in St. Louis and is an alumnus of the Contemporary Photography program at the ICP in New York. He currently holds a leadership position with the Kinship Photography Collective, leading workshops on photography, sequencing, and bookmaking. Mace is also the co-founder of Ramble Editions, launched with Kristen Welles Bartley, as a new vision for collaborative photobook creation and publishing. His work has been shown in galleries and exhibitions in New York, North Carolina, and Georgia.
