what is lost...what has been

I am presently working on a series of images influenced by notions of belonging, otherness and loss in relation to queerness and the photographic family album. The title 'what is lost…what has been', incorporates memorial images/reliquaries of deceased close friends, people I considered my family. I have reached a time in my life where the majority of people I have loved in this world are now deceased. The covid crisis took a dear friend who was the last remaining connection to my childhood. She didn’t contract the virus, but her demise was a consequence of being isolated from the outside world, which has been the story for so many elderly people during this period. After the death of my closest friend in 2017, I began this series memorialising those who had made a significant impact on my life. These works are linked by photographic gestures that I perform with my husband Peter who is almost 30 years my senior, and at a different point in life’s journey. The title is an amalgam of ideas of mourning and melancholia explored by Darian Leader in "the new black" and Roland Barthes reflection on the loss of his mother, "camera Lucida". In reclaiming the family album, I want to address universal themes of memory, loss, mourning and melancholia. The concept of memorialisation is particularly pertinent to Photogaphy, a condition which Roland Barthes referred to as ‘what has been’. We try to capture our loved ones through the photographic moment, but the attempt to capture ‘time’ only testifies to its passing, ‘this has been’.