Tokyo 2012 © Miri Berlin Photography
Hi everyone & Hallo, I would love to introduce you to one of my favourite podcast episodes, that I have started listening to a few months ago. It has nothing to do with photography, which is nothing unusual for me.
It's about Storytelling, it's about creativity and how our perception and imagination can play tricks on us. It's about how someone can touch your soul one way or the other while at same time leaving hardly any impression on the second person present.
In this episode called "Searching for Sally", Tally Abecassis the host of "First Day Back" takes us on her journey, while she is searching for her teacher from elementary school, who had a great impact on her life and career.
Tally asked herself why Sally pushed her into documentary, did she see something special in her, or was Tally just projecting a whole lot of meaning onto it ?
I have listened to this episode a couple of times, as if I was searching for something. It felt like reading a good short story, or as if my eyes lingered on a great photograph or painting.
Here's an extract:
I went to a Jewish school two blocks from my house. It was run by two rabbis and a non-Jewish principal who I think was responsible for bringing in this teacher, Sally Mackey. She was this gorgeous artsy woman who did a form of enrichment programming that was trendy back then. She wore her dark hair in a tight bun and she wore long glamorous dresses and swooped around the school. She would pull us out of class and do projects with us in little groups. I remember her as somebody completely different from anyone else in my life back then. It's like school was regular school the way you imagine it and then for classes with Sally we ate those Alice in Wonderland cookies and went off to some place where we did stuff that made no sense in the other world. She had us make poetry out of items in the grocery circular, she had us dress like famous psychologists we researched, she had objects on the wall that were like sculptures, not just Impressionist prints like my parents had. I remember at one point when there wasn't enough space in the building, they moved Sally's office to a janitor closet near the boys bathroom, she said we were going to do a study on toilet flushes. Imagine how radical that seemed to a bunch of 11 year olds. I thought she was nuts and I wanted to be like her.
She was unconventional and creative and just clearly marched to the beat of her own music.© Tally Abecassis