Barbara’s little house of flowers

CONSERVATION & CAPTURE

Grant year: 2020

Grant category: Al Larvick National Grant

Grant recipient: Emma Kemp

Collection title: Barbara’s Little House of Flowers

Primary maker(s):  Barbara Reisner

Original format: 8mm and Super 8 film, black and white, color, silent

Circa: 1940-1980

Collection size: Approximately 10,400ft, 40 reels of films; hundreds of still photographs, ephemera and objects

Grant support: Cleaning and repair and digital capture of approximately 4500ft of the overall film collection

Digital capture format: Scanned at 2k resolution

Lab: Pro8mm

Status:  Conservation and digitization completed

Online Access: Coming soon

Creative Commons License: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 

Grantee

Emma Kemp is a writer and artist currently living in Los Angeles, where she teaches at Otis College of Art & Design and programs the Summer Institute Studio Residency at California Institute of the Arts. Emma received an MFA in Writing from CalArts and a BA from Central Saint Martins in London, U.K. 

Her book, Blue Pool, Cecelia (iTi Press, 2018) is a collaboration with photographer Jo Ann Walters, interrogating Walter’s photographs of women living along the margins of the Mississippi. Emma co-authored and edited Rockhaven: A History of Interiors, an essay collection concerned with Crescenta Valley’s proto-feminist psychiatric institution, Rockhaven Sanitarium, and most recently, organized and contributed to a collection of texts by educators in response to the global pandemic (East of Borneo, 2021).

Awards include a CalArts Faculty Research Grant; Utah Humanities Research Fellowship; Image-Text-Ithaca Residency; and the New Voices award. Her work has been exhibited, hosted and screened at institutions in the U.S. and Europe. 

“Barbara Reisner was my landlord for almost eight years. I lived in a small, quaint guest house in the back of her property, and she lived in the main house up front. When she passed away, it was with great respect that I found myself sorting through a lifetime of memories and ephemera. Although I had lived 15-feet from Barbara for years and interacted with her daily during that time, I was suddenly peering through a window into another dimension of her life: that of her youth. As a writer and professor, I am very much interested in exploring this secondary relationship to Barbara through her documentary fragments. I hope to preserve both the material and immaterial artifacts of her life; to share with others the vibrant attention of her camera, her pencil, her heart.” ~ Emma Kemp

Filmmaker

Barbara Joan Reisner was born in Glendale Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles, California in May of 1932. Her mother, Virginia Fisher, hailed from Bucyrus, Ohio; her father, Julius Reisner, from Poland. Barbara was raised in the Highland Park neighborhood of Northeast L.A. and lived in one house for almost her entire life, surrounded by animals (her mother would rescue stray birds, cats, anything living) and a strong sense of faith (her father, who had long worked as a cement laborer, came to teach bible class at renowned televangelist Aimee Semple McPhereson’s Angelus Temple). 

At an early age, Barbara took up the violin and through music she found ballet. Eclectic and determined, she founded the first and only U.S.-based print ephemera fan club for Russian Prima-ballerina Alexandra Danilova, soliciting fan memorabilia from teens around the country and hand binding the folios each month. After graduating high school, Barbara trained as a visual artist and built a career in graphic illustration, working for The Broadway in the golden age of advertising. Later in life, she became an active member of her local church and of the Opossum Society of the United States, devoting herself to caring for L.A.s urban critters. In March of 2020, Barbara passed away, alone in a quarantine ward, in the same hospital in which she had been born.

“Barbara spent her whole life trying to keep track of “The vast photographic albums and visual scrapbooks produced by Barbara over the span of her life are testament to her vibrant living. She spent a lifetime tracking people, memories, love. Her insistence on recording her abundant life, of capturing the spirit of her talented, beautiful, and eccentric friends has produced a rich inventory that tells us something about what it means to be a woman in America who follows an unconventional path. Here is an American story that spans great cultural shifts; the story of a woman brimming with faith, working to find her way in the contemporary world. At every turn she shirks convention. She rears baby possums in the kitchen, supports a 4ft 2, 80lb trapeze artist who was living in a trailer on our street, plays violin as her hearing fades, grows roses on the porch, at 87 paints her nails sparkly green, eats breakfast only and always at McDonalds, lunches at Coco’s with friends… Los Angeles, Poland, Germany, 1950s, 1960s, 1970s -- these locations and dates alone promise a varied snapshot of life in transition through the eyes of a fierce, uncompromising spirit.” ~ Emma Kemp

Collection

With an artist’s eye, Barbara was keen to explore her family history in Europe as well as across the United States. She travelled often throughout the 1950s, 60s and 70s, documenting the rural villages and town squares of her father’s youth that constituted the former territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; she toured pastoral regions of Southern Italy and the great cultural institutions of New York. Her images capture these vistas from the perspective of a young American woman forging a path for herself in the Arts. Ahead of her time, Barbara’s camera pays attentions to the intimate moments of life and the connections forged between people, animals, and nature. 

Like her mother, and her mother’s mother, Barbara was a magpie when it came to memories. Barbara documented that which she adored, which included: music, animals, religion, plants, art — these were her passions, and she filled dozens of scrap books, photo albums and reels of film with these subjects. 

As the daughter of a Polish immigrant, Barbara made two major trips to Europe in the 1950s and 60s, both of which are captured on film. After graduating college, Barbara worked for a spell as a fashion illustrator in the advertising department for The Broadway, a now historic (and defunct) department store in Los Angeles. Erstwhile her passion as a concert violinist began to flourish into opportunity. These activities are documented as part of this collection. 

Perhaps most illustrious of this memorabilia is the presence of famed Prima Ballerina Madame Alexandra Danilova, whom Barbara had befriended as a teenager when she founded and ran the Alexandra Danilova “Choura” Fan Club. An extensive exchange of written correspondence between Barbara and Danilova accompanies this archive, with portraits of Danilova taken by Barbara in casual, candid mode. 

Everything was shot by Barbara herself, in the amateur style of filmmaking. All filmic content was shot by Barbara over several decades. From Alexandra Danilova to cloistered nuns; coteries of stray cats to generations of opossums named Russel; from Northeast Los Angeles to Burbank to Hollywood; from London to Poland to Ohio, Barbara’s singular eye reigns over all she experienced, recorded, and preserved for us today.