Item #320403105153 (Var så god)

I purchased “A lot of 1000+ vacation slides” on eBay, all from one family and range from the mid-forties to the early-seventies, the era of the nuclear family to the era of divorce. What drew me to the slides initially was the way they were categorized/cataloged, but as I made my way through the archive, I became more interested in the second hand experience of someone else’s life, as depicted through their family photographs, the similarities and differences between their memories and my own, and by how the camera technology of that time period impacts the visual aesthetic one has of those memories. By digitally blacking out or covering up parts of the selected images, I am able to emphasize the image ‘punctum’ or direct relationship with the details depicted, based on both collective and personal memory, and the general slippage in memory over time. On the collective level, this series investigates the dynamics and complexities of familial relationships, generally speaking, and the mediated experience of place, twice removed. On the personal level, the owner of the archive was a middle aged woman whose images focused on her father as a dominant character and several trips to his homeland of Sweden. Over time I have come to see this work as a means of working through both the connection to my Swedish last name (by marriage) and the complex relationship that I have with my own father.