neg

In my work, I am exploring photography as a medium, focusing on issues like the perception of time and light, of identity and memory. I am particularly interested in the way technical and psychological aspects of photography meet. My series "neg" is about the way we look at family portraits. Starting from a very personal point, I try to address more general questions. When my mother died some years ago, I inherited all the family photos. Albums year by year as well as boxes full of unsorted photos from 1870 until today. There are lots of prints, but there are no negatives. The negatives of the older family photos have been thrown away a long time ago, and from recent images, there have never been any negatives, only digital files. In my series neg, I (re)created the negatives. I combined them with positives, layering similar portraits from different generations. I am interested in the point where the layers and the persons seem to melt into each other, where there’s a new, ambiguous portrait which is more than the literal combination of postive and negative. Like the essence of the family.