Rochester Institute of Technology
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2-22-2013
Eat a peach
Lisa Adamucci
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Recommended Citation
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EAT A PEACH
By
Lisa Adamucci
A Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of Master of Fine Arts
In Imaging Arts
School of Photographic Arts and Sciences
College of Imaging Arts and Sciences
Rochester Institute of Technology
Rochester, NY
February 22, 2013
Approval:
Dan Larkin
Date
Committee Chair
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Eat a Peach
Eat a Peach
By Lisa Adamucci
B.F.A., Visual Arts, Richard Stockton College of New Jersey, 2007
M.F.A., Imaging Arts, Rochester Institute of Technology, 2013
Eat a Peach focuses on the members of my immediate family and each individual’s
relationship to our small southern New Jersey peach farm. There are seven of us: my
mother and father, my four brothers, and me. As the only daughter, I had it easy. Being
a girl excused me from doing just about anything one could think of on the farm:
waking up early, working late, taking out the trash, feeding the dogs, driving the
forklift, picking and sorting peaches, watching the winch, plowing the fields, disking,
roping, and spraying. Almost daily one of my brothers—Carmen, Tony, Tommy, or
Mikey—would vehemently demand my parents answer the same incriminating
question: “But why doesn’t Lisa have to do anything?” And someone—including me—
would always remind them: “Because…she’s a girl.”
It’s fair to say that I grew up in an atmosphere governed by patriarchal values: My father
is a third-generation peach grower, a second generation American of Italian descent. I
would watch him chastise my older brothers for not helping on the farm in the summers,
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Over the past ten years our four hundred-acre farm has gotten smaller. Equipment that
was once new has become worn, sometimes on the verge of obsolescence. Land that once
held acres of orchard has been taken out of production, the crop replaced with a
commodity that is easier to grow: soybeans, rye, wheat—some sections left untilled,
relinquished to the weeds.
Growing up, I never gave the farm much thought, treating it as a place where my family
lived and nothing more. When I began photographing the members of my family the
farm took on a life of its own, like a long-lost family member I wanted to get
reacquainted with. I became more curious about the business, history, and daily routines
of the farm. I also wanted to explore the relationships within my family. The farm has
always been the one constant, uniting everyone together. Through the work surrounding
my thesis project, I began to see the farm as a kind of supreme patriarch, one to which
everyone—from my grandfather to my youngest brother—submitted. The farm became,
for me, a ruling force; I wanted to understand it, to uncover the reason for its allure. And
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Untitled, 2010
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10
12
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My work operates in the context of description and personal narrative as part of
the inevitable complexity of my relationship to the content. John Berger wrote that
a photograph “always and by its nature refers to what is not seen….What it shows
invokes what is not shown.”1 Many photographers, writers, and artists have
influenced me; this project however, evolved from matters of the heart and an
undeniable compulsion to describe this world. This type of imagery is often
photographed in a way that reduces complex subject matter to stereotype. I have
made every effort to avoid reasserting those representations, even by accident.
Without question I saved the most difficult part for last and I accept that what
“shows” is merely a substitute for “what is not shown.”
1 John Berger, “Understanding a Photograph,” in Alan Trachtenberg, Reading American Photographs:
Images As History Mathew Brady to Walker Evans (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 293.
LIST OF FIGURES
Making Someone Happy, 2009………...……1
Tiger Lily, 2009………...……2
Untitled, 2010……….…3
Garret Room, 2009………...…....4
Pieta, 2009………...……5
Junior, 2009………..…...……6
Sunday Best, 2010………...……7
Lamb, 2010………...……8
Be Good, Be Good, 2010……….……9
Sophie, 2010………...…..10
Mongoose, 2009………..….11
Bail, 2009………...12
Christmas Card, 2009………...….13
Untitled, 2010………...….14
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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Cohen, Stuart, and Peter B. Hales. The Likes of Us: America in the Eyes of the Farm Security Administration. Boston: David R. Godine, 2009.
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Gedney, William, Margaret Sartor, and Geoff Dyer. What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. New York: Center for Documentary Studies, 2000.
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