Colin Wood, Diane Arbus's 'Child With A Toy Hand Grenade,' Looks Back
It's the tilt of the head that strikes you low gear. The male child is considering something, contemplating. Maybe. Maybe non. Then, it's the eyes. How wide vulnerable they are, how they look like the eyes of a boy who's patently pull a face, which he is, but besides pained. Then you notice that in the heat of whatever this bit is, one strap of his overalls has destroyed off his shoulder. Perchance he was running. Hard to say. Maybe atomic number 2's glad. Operating theatre sad. Either way, he's manic and he's holding a grenade.
Diane Arbus took many a memorable photos over the line of her storied career. But when it was published her "Child With Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, N.Y.C, 1962" made waves. It was a innovative musical composition of work and immediately recognized intrinsically, which is why you probably maybe kinda realise the image. It's an prowess photography touchstone normally used in opposed-warfare propaganda. It's a portrait of the Vietnam era that shows instead of tells. It's, allegedly, what divine Matt Groening to create Baronet Mrs. Simpson.
And it's Colin Wood.
"I was mobile and offensive with a smile on my face."
When the photo was seized, Wood was a seven-year-old kid. He's directly 63 and, when he sees that image he remembers a dark period. "That time of my lifespan wasn't the happiest," he says. "My parents were divorced. I was roiled. And I didn't know how to articulate it. I was mobile and hostile with a smile on my face."
Wood still has the same smile today — though whether or not it actually qualifies as a smile is debatable. Same of Wood's sons, Mulligan, WHO is a college student, refers to the expression every bit his daddy's "grimace."
As Wood and I talk, Mulligan is feeding pancakes. Wood's wife, who is referred to exclusively as "Mumzy," is taking an good afternoon short sleep. The night before, he says, they ate a delicious sandwich made tabu of Mumzy's special homemade sourdough olive moolah with chopped roast chicken and mustard. It was good. Workaday.
Forest's existence is kind of ordinary these years. He lives in Los Angeles and whole works as a long-full term insurance care agent. He's defined down. He's a family line man. But the tiddler in the pic resurfaces from time to clock time.
"I'm non normal in a lot of ways," Wood admits. "One fourth dimension, I took all my wearing apparel off and jumped nude into this basketball player's pool. He was a headliner, a basketball genius in New York. I'm a teensy bit rebellious or something. I don't like beingness told what to do. I'm suspect of mobs. I Don't like groups. I don't like people with authorisation nerve-wracking to tell me that they have a good idea, that I should put happening a uniform and tend at that bunker. You make out what I mean?"
For better or worse, Grant Wood's image has always been shorthand for the angriness of restless American boys. Talking to him, this feels right some stratum, but it's clear that information technology was also a burden. No cardinal wants to atomic number 4 that minor. No one wants to be that kid in perpetuity.
"I was always asked. 'What happened to it Thomas Kyd? Did he commit suicide? Is he in put away? Is He on the streets?'" says Forest. "He's vii-years-old and he wants to blow everybody up!"
Wood didn't blow anything up. But it's non like there was never a possibility of madness. Wood was born in Unexampled House of York on the Upper West Side in 1955. Sidney, his begetter, was a professional tennis player most magnificently glorious for being the only to of all time win the 1931 Wimbledon singles rubric past default. Despite that, he was graded many than one time in the top ten greats. Sidney was also married four times. And, as Forest says, "he was stark-staring crazy."
Wood's parents divorced and his mother died when he was 12 so he was raised by a series of measure-mothers who were of the upper-crust New York type. He became wellspring-titled the male child in Arbus' photo some the time he was in senior high school when a fellow classmate printed out the image and glued IT near the lockers. His notoriety spread. His footmark-family didn't take very advisable to the image, nor to the way it was originally exhibited as a percentage of an ongoing collection that convergent along bereft and stigmatized Americans.
After the finis of Sidney's divorces and after Wood graduated from college, they founded a business concern in collaboration that sold conventionalized surfaces to tennis courts ended the world. Wood, equally a resolution, spent a good portion of his proterozoic adulthood jet-setting from Germany to British Columbia University to West Africa. The two of them made good money. They also got into their fair share of "mucilaginous situations."
One story he tells involves his generate wrestle a $75,000 water ticker out of a rising river on a mining operation in British Columbia at the age of 75. Another involves Woodwind having a gun pressed to his head. Wood is a guy with crazy stories. There are a lot of them and thither is a standard theme: batshit optimism. Sir Henry Joseph Wood is a guy who does binge. He may have plans, but he definitely has impulses. Always has.
"I became really close with this guy named Jorge when I was edifice courts," Wood remembers. "He was going back to Bogota. He was leaving in the car. I said, 'I don't know what I'm going to do next, Jorge. I don't know what's going to happen.' And then helium said, 'Eres muy ingenioso,' which agency, 'You'rhenium precise resourceful.'
"Nothing is really ever A bad every bit it seems, unless you're in Baghdad."
Wood isn't sure, soh helium asks Mulligan if that's true. Mulligan stew, either actually believing it operating theater just beingness a polite kid, assures him information technology is.
"Nothing is really ever As bad as it seems, unless you're in Baghdad," Wood says. "I've had guns imitative me. I've had my life vulnerable. I've been tired of. Bad things happened and nonfunctional things went away. Something's e'er exit to turn up. I always think it's active to be interesting soon."
That sentiment may not sound like it applies to his domestic idyll, but his happily family is ultimately a product of his sort of loving recklessness. "I didn't decide to do IT. I was married, and my first married woman aforesaid, let's get out of present. And I said okay. And then I bailed and we ended aweigh in San Francisco, got divorced, and then I remarried a German."
That German is Mumzy, WHO is all the same napping on the couch. She's the daughter of a north-German farmer and a baker of killer bread. When Colin says he can't consider that he married a German, she calls out, possibly still from the couch, half-unawakened, that she can't believe she united an American.
Wood has been working in womb-to-tomb-full term care insurance since 1999. Both of his sons were homeschooled. In early dustup, he's been a persist-at-home dad for their entire lives. Their bonds are strong. Their jokes at each others' expenses are funny. Wood says they make his life crazy. But it also seems the like they made his life-time calm. On composition, Wood's life has settled down to a great degree. But when Wood speaks it's sometimes hard-fought to severalize what's real and made up.
What's true is that Arbus captured a photo of a young boy choke-full of frenetic energy that panicked people — that made people look twice in fear or horror or sympathy. Then that young boy grew up to be a Isle of Man full of frenetic zip. A happy man. A father. A good guy. And, yes, a guy who thinks about that photograph from time to time.
"I see a future bank robber," he laughs. "I see a sensitive soul. I see a goofball. I see the father of these two goofballs I got. IT doesn't matter. Frankly, when I look at it I sort of just find IT in passing because it's just disunite of my saga, the Wood Saga. I don't really suppose I give any pride in it, but I don't have whatsoever shame in it."
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