Francie Bishop Good

Comus

My mother and I graduated from the same high school in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I am obsessed with both of our high school yearbooks and engrossed with the  similarities and differences in the general and specifics. Allentown has gone through transformations and in many ways is a microcosm for other towns in the United States. I found my mother’s Comus, yearbook after she died. She was the class of 1942 and wrote comments next to many of her classmates’ pictures, for example, “Killed in a mission fighting over Germany” or “Died in 1979” giving the photographs a heightened sense and an endless source for my imagination.  I reflect on the styles, the hair, and the self-centered innocence from my own class of 1967, providing me with a limitless source of material for this series. My graduation year was absolutely the last minute of American small-town innocence, and the portraits convey that: the smiles, the personal grooming, and the tidy clothing. This series is a staccato of media and a hybrid form of portraiture. I cross-pollinate painting, photography, drawing, and collage with digital layering. 
 

The source material of photographs from yearbooks is something very personal yet universal. I am transforming the imagined. “Comus” was and still is the title of the yearbooks from Allentown High School. These portraits are a jumping off point for my experimental work and digital encounters.Merging and compressing ideas and time, I transform the high school yearbook pictures to a new reality.