CHERRY HILL
Childhood Reimagined by Jona Frank w/ Laura Dern
Cherry Hill: A Childhood Reimagined is not your typical memoir. It’s a photographic journey through Jona Frank’s life growing up in the suburban New Jersey town, Cherry Hill. Frank, an accomplished photographer, created vivid artistic scenes inspired by her youth. Recreating period wardrobes, elaborate sets, and casting actors to portray herself in various stages of her life, she recruited her friend, Academy Award-winning actor, Laura Dern, to play the role of her complex mother, Rose Frank.
“Cherry Hill is, in a sense, an exercise in time travel. It’s a creation of the moments we are meant to leave behind. It’s a girl’s story about defining her place in her family, while also wanting to find her purpose outside of it,” said Ms. Frank.
The written narrative and images bring Frank’s personal childhood memories to the surface. It is the story of a young girl managing the mundane, dreaming of a friendship with Emily Dickinson, longing for Bruce Springsteen, wanting more, while coping with her mother’s depression and her brother’s breakdown. “I feel like there is a lot tied up in this idea that you keep family secrets and what I did was talk about my family and talk about my life and my experience,” shared Frank. “I’m realizing how much I don’t want to be ashamed of that. I don’t want to be ashamed that there was mental illness in my family. I don’t want to be ashamed that my mother was not always a shining star of a mom.”
The idea for Cherry Hill came to Frank in 2015 and took almost 5 years to complete. Most of it was staged at an old beach house near her home in Santa Monica, California where the rooms were painted, wall-papered, and furnished to resemble her family’s idyllic suburban home. In the book Frank writes, “There is this idea that comes with life in the suburbs: line it all up nicely, iron out the wrinkles, repeat the pattern, and you will be happy. My mother believed that suburbia offered her order and certainty.”
Frank’s book is a carefully curated narrative of her memories brought to life by Laura Dern and other actors. It is a story about a young girl, coming of age and ultimately finding her way out. While she escaped, her parents never left New Jersey. Her father passed away last year at the age of 94 and her mother, Rose now 92, lives just 40-minutes from Cherry Hill.
An exhibition of Cherry Hill will open at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick, Maine in January 2022.
