“A hero is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself,” mythology expert Joseph Campbell wrote. “We are all the heroes of our own story.”
In her early 20s, photographer Joyce Tenneson read Campbell’s book, “A Hero with 1000 Faces,” which describes the journey of a archetypical hero across cultures. Tenneson said the book had a profound effect on her life.
“That [book] was about the archetypal journey of basically men and how they found who they were,” Tenneson said. “I felt like I wanted to go out into the bigger world, discovering who I could be. I was truly driven to go out every day and confront myself … [Campbell] certainly changed my life in a positive way.”
Tenneson’s life is the subject of a new documentary, “Unveiled: Joyce Tenneson and the Heroine’s Journey,” which will be shown at the Sedona International Film Festival on Feb. 22 and 24. Tenneson and filmmakers Rebecca Dreyfus and Randy Gebhardt will be in Sedona to discuss the film.
“We started shooting essentially in late 2018 for about nine months,” Gebhardt noted. “This film sort of re-evolved with new information … actually as we were re-editing it, we went back and did three different pickup shoots even as recently as last year.”
Early Years
Tenneson grew up in Weston, Mass., on the grounds of a convent. Her parents both worked for the nuns.
“Although I didn’t have a happy childhood, I have to thank that experience for opening me up to the world of mystery and rituals,” Tenneson said. “It really was, in many ways, a surreal experience.”
Tenneson earned a bachelor’s degree from Regis College in 1967, a master’s degree from George Washington University in 1969 and a Ph.D. in 1978 from Union Graduate School, Antioch College.
While Tenneson married right out of college, she didn’t want to be a housewife or a lady who lunches. She wanted to have a child. For years, she and her husband tried to have a child but couldn’t.
“We went to the fertility clinic, and it seemed like there was a problem with me,” Tenneson said. “Realizing that I was never going to be able to conceive sent me into a deep depression and went into some very tense therapy about being so depressed.”
She started seeing a psychiatrist on the Georgetown faculty. He was 30 years older than Tenneson. A month after a one-night stand, Tenneson found out that she was pregnant.
“Having tried for like four years — I told my husband honestly what had happened,” Tenneson said. “He said, ‘Do you want to marry this man?’ And I said ‘No.’ ‘Well, are you in love with him?’ ‘No.’ ‘Well, there’s no problem. We wanted to have a baby and here it is. Let’s not speak about it again.’ And he did not talk about it anymore.”
Tenneson hid the truth for 45 years.
Twist of Fate
“There’s always a conflict of being true to your art and really wanting to be the full artist and then feeling like you’re a bad mom,” Tenneson said. “There’s just constant guilt. You never feel like you’re doing anything well, like you always feel like you’re failing as a mom when you’re an artist.”
“The story about Joyce is really about women’s journey over time and personally, and then suddenly, the secret revealed itself in the middle, and it was like, wow, her part of life is in fact an encapsulation of the many tough decisions that all women who are seeking a career and self-expression face,” Gebhardt stated. “So that’s kind of how it all evolved, and it was serendipity and we let the film reflect that.”
During filming, Tenneson’s son Alex Cohen took a DNA test. It revealed that he had three siblings, who were unknown to him, an only child.
“It was unbelievable to really think that maybe my father wasn’t my father,” Cohen stated in the film. “It took me a while to sort of get my head around it. I confronted Joyce and she confessed effectively. It was a bad choice. My father made the same bad choice. They made a bad decision as parents, but Joyce is the only one around now.”
“The worst moment of my life was hurting Alex so much,” Tenneson said. “I never really experienced unconditional love before I had Alex when this whole thing exploded. I felt his unconditional love for me go away. I felt his anger.”
“I was carrying a bag of bricks around my neck the whole time because I never forgot it and I always thought it’d be the year to tell him,” Tenneson explained. “I wondered if he would be better off for knowing this. And certainly, I was afraid. It is frightening when you have only one child.”
‘Wise Women’
Tenneson’s primarily shoots nude or semi-nude women using a Polaroid 20 x 24 camera. Her portraits have appeared on the covers of Time, Life, Newsweek, Esquire and the New York Times Magazine. She is the author of 16 books, including her best seller, “Wise Women,” a celebration of the power and beauty of women in the third phase of their lives. The book includes 80 portraits of women aged 65 to 100, who share their experiences of ageing.
Tenneson’s work is a combination of portraiture and mythology. Her work has been described as “evocative, poetic, ethereal, feminine” and celebrates women.
“Tenneson possesses a unique vision which makes her photographs immediately recognizable,” photography critic Vicki Goldberg summarized. “She creates enigmatic and sensuous images that are timeless and haunting.”
“Early on, I don’t think a lot of critics really liked my work,” Tenneson said. “They felt it was too female. I wasn’t trying to be female. I was presenting my inner life. It was part of me that would not be put down.”
“I was struck right away that she bookended her career on two books that really empowered females and women in society in a very empowering and nontraditional way,” Gebhardt said. “And I started to realize that this film had to be about a lot more than her photography … Her work was simply not accepted in the early years. And she just kept fighting and fighting and fighting and, as she says, she stuck to her voice, she stuck to her vision, and she eventually broke through.”
“Honestly, I think I would have rather died and not pursued who I felt was my deeper self that I wanted to bring out in my work,” Tenneson said.
