Blood Line

Once your parents pass away, you realize you’re next in line. My father was diagnosed with terminal cancer at the tender age of 64. Blood Line investigates how his inescapable disease and death also affected my own life. My subjects are my daughters, my flesh and blood, his descendants. They are actors. He experienced, I processed, they embody. With this work I address how terminal illness turns lives upside down and affects communication and identity. When I was with my dad, he and I knew his days were numbered. I was able to say things I might not have shared before, but I also found myself withholding private thoughts. My version of reality and truth shifted. Blood Line illustrates the ensuing coding of language and our morphing sense of Self. Life as I knew it was radically redefined and my personal definition of a photograph evolved. In much of the work, I altered the surface of my pigment ink prints with the medical supplies that overtook our lives, such as gauze, suture thread, eosin…, even my own blood that I drew from my fingers. I cut the prints with scalpels and tore them by hand. By lineage, I am the literal link between my father and my daughters. Now I am also that link through the work of my hands. A year later he is gone, and when I am too, the photographs will still be there to connect us all.