Forty years after she began taking pictures of her seven children, Nolan’s striking images are being published for the first time. Here the 79-year-old former classmate of Lou Reed reveals how the gift of a camera transformed her life
Peggy Nolan had just turned 40, when, on a whim, her father gave her a Nikon camera that had been left unclaimed in his pawnshop in Miami. Back then, in the early 1980s, she was raising seven children – four boys and three girls, ranging in age from two to 17 – in a government-subsidised house in Naranja, a suburban neighbourhood near Miami. Untutored but curious, she began to photograph her immediate environment and soon realised that she had found her own, singular way of seeing the world around her.
“At first, I really didn’t know what I was doing,” she says, “but I remember shooting a picture through the leaves of the trees in front of the house and suddenly knowing somehow that this was how I should do it, this was how I should look. It was innate.”
