
As the photographer of the family, I was entrusted with the task of digitizing the collection of images accumulated over my grandmother’s lifetime. There are a lot of missing pieces here and what feels like a scarcity of time to share all the images with surviving family members who can answer the questions these photographs raise. So, ultimately, that is why I am here doing this.
Social media may seem a reasonable platform for sharing images and learning histories, but I’ve become disillusioned with those forums. Sharing reveries on my website feels like a more meaningful way of processing these stories, which will certainly inform my studio practice (and in many instances, already has). These entries will take the form of reflections, essays, reviews, poems, and free-association ramblings, but it would also be badass if this could be a space to receive feedback from YOU and create discourse around whatever topic is at hand.
Today, I open with a question: in light of the reality we find ourselves in, one that has us constantly capturing and consuming images, how is it possible that the photograph can still completely captivate me?
(For that matter, how long do we truly spend looking at a real photograph?)
There seems to be a universal experience in which most people come face to face with the value of a photograph- when their beloveds pass away leaving only artifacts and photographs behind. Yes, I read Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida in graduate school and I know how this is starting to sound. Ghosts are real and they live in photographs. But these ghosts do not render the whole being. So, who the hell are these people I am looking at?
The first image I have shared is a photomontage of my mother, her sister, and a neighbor boy in front of their home after a big snow overlayed with an image that I made of the home after it was sold and renovated. This image epitomizes my interest in documentation of place through layers of time. It appropriates a photograph likely taken by my grandfather & creates a kind of collaboration with him despite never having known him in his time on this earth. By mining through my grandmother’s photographs, I am drawing a thread through a forgotten past and the present moment as it unfolds before me. Through this process, I have been introduced to people that I never knew and to versions of people I have known my whole life that were not accessible before.
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Have you ever had a dream that you were in a place that felt familiar, but when you look around it is not at all what you remember? I don't mean that the placement of things is out of order or the paint color on the wall is wrong. I mean spatially the place is not what it is supposed to be and strangers occupy the rooms that are supposed to hold your family. The day that I made the photograph of the present day house that was once my grandmother's, I had this exact experience in waking life.
While creeping around outside trying to get some images of the house, a dog came barreling out of the open door. There are a number of reasons why this is significant, not the least of which is my enthusiasm for making a new dog friend, especially a big derpy one. My grandmother would NEVER allow a dog inside of her house! And so, here is our first reminder that my grandmother no longer has power here. More importantly, it gave me an in. Following the bounding Labrador was a young shirtless fella (another indicator that grandma isn't here anymore). As he apologized all over himself for his dogs' behavior (which I am obviously a big fan of), I explained to him who I was and why I was there. The young man was very polite and invited me in to look around. I couldn't bring myself to go much further than just inside the front door- that was all it took for me to feel completely disoriented. The shape of the space wasn't even the same. The ceilings were taller and the wall that used to separate the kitchen from the living room had been replaced by open space and an island. The brown shaggy carpet that ran through the living room into the yellow gridded linoleum in the kitchen had all been replaced by hardwood flooring. It was physically overwhelming to stand in this space where my mother had grown up, where me and my siblings had spent holidays and birthdays and weekends, and realize that nothing was what I thought it should be. A couple of weeks later, while shopping along in an antique store with some friends, I discovered several pieces of furniture that felt suspiciously familiar. When I say felt, I mean I got down on the floor and studied the marks and chips on the surface of a desk chair with my eyes and my hands, and it was as if I was experiencing a memory. Things that should have been inside the house that I had just visited were now floating about in this foreign space. Not just foreign, but public! I don't have confirmation that the furniture I found that day truly came from my grandmother's house, but the experience was so bizarre that I couldn't leave the desk chair behind. It is such a strange thing to feel disoriented in a place that should feel familiar countered with being in an unfamiliar place that holds objects you thought only existed in your memory.
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