Family Flashback

Interior designer Katie McGloin, like many of her clients, had gone through life with her family pictures in a box, intending one day to sort them out, get them organized, display them somehow in her house. But she was busy getting married, working, having children, and the idea of cluttered shelves and tables bothered her--even a clutter of cherished faces.

Then, a year and a half ago, she hired Jesse Williams, who specializes in hanging art, to help her place paintings and other pieces in her Santa Monica house. “He told me it was time I had a picture wall,” says McGloin, “a place to lay out our family’s story.”

Williams advised McGloin, who’s from a large Texas clan, to cull images from her family and that of her husband Tom, raised in Maine and New York. To these, she added photos of their courtship, wedding and children--Lucia, 6, and Lionel, 4--in a variety of sizes.

“Mixing them up,” explains Williams, who owns Argo Art Services in Valley Glen, “black-and-white with color, great-grandparents with new babies, formal portraits with candid shots, gives the whole thing a noisy, random feel, like life. It’s not a list. It’s an ongoing saga.”

McGloin provided the cast of characters, in about 70 photos altogether, and the setting, an 8-by-10-foot wall at the top of her stairs. In two hours, Williams assembled the tale. Winding back through decades, it includes travels in Europe and the U.S., high school reunions, first days of school, a beloved dog, now deceased, and the young man, pictured astride a camel, who sired a chubby baby named Tommy who grew up into the husband and dad posing recently with his family on the Venice boardwalk.

“This has become a central feature of our house,” notes McGloin. “It’s a way for our children to remember distant cousins, to learn about the family tree and, for us, to talk about our past. For the first time this year, we didn’t fly back to spend the holidays with my parents, but we still feel we have them with us.”

Over the last 15 years, Williams estimates that he has hung at least 500 picture walls for clients, from a woman who handed him “200 shots of every dog and friend she’d ever had” to others bearing fuzzy sepias of relatives landing on Ellis Island, complete with their framed documents of immigration.

“At a great party, everyone winds up in the kitchen,” Williams observes. “If you have a Picasso and a picture wall, people gravitate toward the wall.” ’ Having children can be a catalyst for organizing photos. In the case of Jody Gerson and Seth Swirsky, the arrival of son Julian in 1994 sparked a scramble through shoe boxes of photos. “I’m from Philadelphia, Seth’s from New York and Connecticut,” says Gerson, who lives in Beverly Hills and works as a senior vice president at EMI Music Publishing. “We realized that, growing up so far away, without those argumentative family dinners and traditional gatherings for Jewish holidays, our son wouldn’t know his history.”

On a wall just off the kitchen, she and Swirsky, an author and songwriter, created a collage of around 40 mostly black-and-white photos presented in what Gerson calls “a hodgepodge of frames that shows what a hodgepodge a family is.”

Radiating out in a loose orbit from a central image--Swirsky’s grandparents’ wedding portrait--the stern, shy and smiling faces belong to long-gone relatives, some of whom neither Gerson nor Swirsky knew: Here is Gerson’s grandmother who, as a young woman, ran off with a Catskills comedian and was never mentioned again. Here is her former husband, a Philadelphia nightclub owner, and their son, Gerson’s dad, photographed with Liberace and Frank Sinatra. Gerson herself is pictured dancing with Diana Ross and the Supremes. Swirsky, whose parents married while in college, is shown as the infant mascot of his father’s Dartmouth fraternity.

Choosing among lifetimes of photos can be daunting, but it helps to look for contextual details that evoke memories and eras as well as people. McGloin, for example, picked shots of her parents that show the furniture she grew up with--the leopard prints and African textiles her mother loved. When she helps clients create their walls, she advises them to “ground” their visual mix by choosing several inexpensive brown and black frames and adding vintage-swap meet finds. “You can even work in drawings, children’s art or shadow boxes full of special trinkets,” she suggests.

Just as framing costs vary, from a few dollars for a ready-made choice to hundreds or even thousands for custom work, so too does the price of putting up your selections. Williams, one among a number of art-hanging specialists around L.A., charges a $75 minimum to hang a picture wall, and if it takes more than an hour, the hourly rate is $50.

Of course, you can arrange your own gallery. Williams suggests building out from a central image and leaving uneven edges. That provides space to add on but won’t make the wall appear unfinished. “Odd numbers are better than even, and a hall is a good location because you’re forced to stand close, and every piece gets seen.”

For McGloin, that careful seeing is important. “These pictures signify the hope that springs eternal in families, even ones with a lot of tussle, like ours,” she says. “In spite of the Thanksgiving dinner that went awry, or a fight with an older brother one Christmas, the bonds are still there, and this is evidence of their strength and our resolve--to stay connected and try again.”