CONVERSATIONS WITH LIGHT

Conversations with Light (2025) revisits a collection of photographic slides made by my late Grandad, Geoff. I returned to these images shortly after the passing of my Nan, having been given the slides by her years earlier. Working with these fragile transparencies became a way of holding onto something that still connected me to her, a way of staying close at a time when I wasn’t yet able to fully face her absence. In returning to the slides, I began to encounter my Grandad through his photographs. His way of seeing, carried within each image, offered a form of familiarity that had been absent in life. In their flicker I find both presence and distance, an inheritance of vision that shapes how I see, even as it reminds me how little I truly knew him. Photographing the slides through his viewer, I began to encounter his images from within his way of seeing. In this act, our perspectives briefly align, separated by time yet held in the same frame. The resulting distortions and soft edges are not corrections, but traces of that meeting, where the image is both his and mine. Alongside this, the slides are returned to their material form. Scanned as objects, marked by dust, scratches, and handling, they speak to lives beyond the image. They are not only records of what was seen, but things that have endured, carrying time within them. From this point of contact, the images begin to shift. Through fragmentation, layering, and digital manipulation, they loosen from their original function. Memory becomes unstable, partial, and tactile, resisting fixed meaning while remaining emotionally charged. This project does not seek resolution. It remains with what is incomplete, what is altered, and what cannot be fully retrieved. In working across these images, I find a quiet closeness, not through reconstruction, but through the act of looking itself, where light continues to carry something forward, even as it fades.