I Hope One Day You’ll Forgive Me

            I am exploring the quintessential family photo album and the memorialization of memory through imagery in manipulated digital images, artist books, and prints. Photographs are seen as a document of authenticity but are far from an accurate depiction of reality. My own childhood is documented in the typical style of the family snapshot – moments smiling and embracing, birthday parties, days at the beach, but the real truth was quite different. Throughout my work, I challenge the universal belief that a picture tells an unbiased story. By manipulating this perceived actuality, I am capable of creating my own truth by blending the realm of memory found in the family photograph with a deeper subtext of the concurrent experiences occurring when the document was created. The resulting images become something the viewer can relate to as representations of kinship, trauma, and forgiveness.

            Drawing upon my personal biography, I manipulate personal vintage family photographs in a number of ways. Digging through my family photo archives, I create high-resolution scans of the images so they can be generated on a much larger scale. I have been particularly drawn to depictions of kinship at the beach, as they capture such a simple moment in time. Through large scale prints of 35mm film photographs, the photographs are taken out of their original snapshot context. The colors are adjusted and desaturated to limited and muted palettes, drawing the subjects to centerstage. Text is often intertwined through the composition, sometimes readable, sometimes not, frustrating the desire for a neat and tidy interpretation. Through Photoshop compositing, the subjects compete for attention as they are covered with transparency layers of letters from my incarcerated father. Parts of the figure become indistinct, faces are indiscernible, and sections of the story within will never be revealed to the viewer. The resulting composites are further deconstructed with various artificial materials such as corn syrup and glitter, bringing forward the falsehoods of photography serving as a document of truth and showing that things are not as sugary and refined as they seem.

Next Time, Just Call Me

            Next Time, Just Call Me is a series of images that captures the story of a relationship from beginning to end through text conversations. Romantic relationships have a transient nature, very similar to text messages. After this particular break-up, I found myself ritualistically revisiting our conversations and rereading their texts as a source of solace and nostalgia. This longing for sentimentality had shifted my perception of memory, and I began to romanticize this person through their words. However, text messages are ephemeral streams of consciousness (met with clumsy typos) sent during a moment in time and possess no intended immortality. Although texting is the standard communication method in our modern era, it is also a problematic medium for conveying emotion. By combining these unclear messages with imagery connected to the personal memories we made together, I've commemorated a relationship that surpassed its expiration date - because it's nice to connect with someone, even if it doesn't last forever.