Darken Snapshots

Stumbling across old snap shots ignited a new narrative about my family. These were the rejected images from our family album and they were the images my parents kept private from me, from a time before I was brought into their lives. I discovered the images when looking for photographs for my mother’s funeral. Finding these little nuggets gave us levity during a time of pain. My father in a jock strap, my mother naked in the tub or only in a bra on the toilet: a memory that was never told to me by them. There is something about finding intimate images of your parents that turns them into strangers. Who is that woman who looks like she had too many cocktails in the woods? They reveal an everyday history.  In light of this new discovery, I began creating new images, Darkened Snaps, derived from these photos, based on my childhood perception of my parents. Darkened Snaps is an abstracted narrative on loss. Taking snap shots and drawing out their momentum into a recess, the Darkened Snaps cross the viewer, left straining to see them, just enough to mimic memory itself. Some are cropped, some are readjusted, obviously darkened, choosing to privilege the conceptual mechanism of cognition over visibility. These images engage the act of remembering to consider what is buried and what is revealed over time. Re-presenting these images crosses the line of the private over into the public realm of the artist who reveals the recesses of her own practice: how one copes through making work.