Cover

Title Page

Broken Things

When I was a kid, it seemed to me that everyone knew my mother better than I did.

That’s a Hannah O’Toole, people would say, pointing at one of her famous photographs, reprinted in a book or framed on a museum wall.

On television, in a Jeopardy! clue: This American is the only woman to win both an International Photography Award and a Pulitzer.

Who is Hannah O’Toole?, Alex.

My mother was an icon, a legend who used her visual arts skills to document catastrophes and suffering so that those who saw her pictures from their safe, first-world homes could find the empathy (and cash) to mend the other parts of the world. She was most often described as if her Leica was a natural extension of her body, an adaptation to a limb that somehow gave her the superpowers of insight and recording. What people didn’t see was what happened when she put that camera down. Without that prosthetic, she faltered.

My father was a conservator, an artist who colored within someone else’s lines. Unlike my mother, who created art, he claimed he didn’t have the eye to tell his own story. Instead, he meticulously painted over chipped plaster on the frescoed ceilings of Newport mansions; he used Japanese tissue and wheat starch paste to mend tears in watercolor paper; he repaired water damage and smoke damage and insect damage to the canvases of Old Masters. His jobs lasted from months to years, depending on who was hiring him and how deep the wounds he was repairing. He was also the one who patched together the ceramic pig I made at summer camp when it fell off my dresser; who could stitch an invisible seam when my favorite dress got caught on a fence and tore; who could rewire the old Tinker Bell lamp we found at a thrift store so that it worked again. He could fix anything that was broken.

Except, maybe, my mother.

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In April 2000, just before I was about to turn ten years old, my mother was headed off on assignment, shooting pictures of a nine-month drought in Ochelata, Oklahoma, to accompany a Washington Post feature on climate change. She had been away for more of my birthdays than she had been present. In fact, I probably would have been surprised had she rearranged her work schedule to be home in New York City with us.