Best With a Dash of Worse
Behind every family album there is a curator. The stories that unfold in
them are based not on the pictures that were taken, but ones that were
printed and chosen for the album. Those who curate our pasts in pictures
hold the key to our perception of history.
Family albums are not only a documentation of our lives, but embody our
alleged collective family memory. The more I looked at images that were not
mine, the ones I found and bought at flea markets and were random in place
and time, the more I found I was able to devise a memory for them.
My work process is, in a sense, an abuse of the medium of photography. I
adopt abandoned, forgotten and misplaced family moments captured in
discarded images, and then willfully appropriate and reclaim them as my
own. My photographs represent my search for belonging within a space I
create.
best, with a dash of worse attempts at forming a narrative from parts that
do not make the same whole, yet it succeeds at doing so when the reader
enables its completion. On recognizing the visual language of a family
album, readers call into play the personal vocabulary of their own family
pictures, and draw upon the archetypal, collective, family album. It is
then that the superimposition of two separate yet interrelated sets of
conditions, personal and collective, occurs.
Behind every family album there is a curator. The stories that unfold in
them are based not on the pictures that were taken, but ones that were
printed and chosen for the album. Those who curate our pasts in pictures
hold the key to our perception of history.
Family albums are not only a documentation of our lives, but embody our
alleged collective family memory. The more I looked at images that were not
mine, the ones I found and bought at flea markets and were random in place
and time, the more I found I was able to devise a memory for them.
My work process is, in a sense, an abuse of the medium of photography. I
adopt abandoned, forgotten and misplaced family moments captured in
discarded images, and then willfully appropriat [read more...]
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