Episode 19: Jona Frank

On this episode of Big Table, artist and photographer Jona Frank talks with J.C. Gabel about her visual memoir, Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined (Monacelli Press), which documents, in elaborately staged sets, her troubled childhood growing up in the suburbs of New Jersey. Frank’s mother suffered from mental illness, as did her brother, who was eventually diagnosed with schizophrenia. In the photographs, three different actors portray Frank at various stages of her adolescence, with actress Laura Dern cast as her mother. Frank’s writing, produced in vignettes, augments the original photography in Cherry Hill, a beautifully packaged book designed by Alex Kalman. As Arthur Lebow pointed out earlier this year in a New York Times feature about Frank's latest book, Jona Frank has “recreated non-Kodak moments, the kind that were hidden rather than commemorated.”