Against Our Vanishing
After my grandmother’s passing in June of 2022, my family began to sort through the hundreds and hundreds of photographs that had been stored in my grandparent’s garage. While looking at this archive and reliving the memories from my childhood, I also started learning about the history and many different memories from within my family that happened long before I was born. The purpose of this body of work from the very beginning was for it to be used as a means to process and grieve the loss of my grandmother.
For as long as I’d known my grandma, the thing she disliked the most was having her picture taken. This meant that for most of my life, photographs with her in them were a pretty rare occurrence. As I started seeing all of these pictures of her that I had never seen before, I wanted to collect as many as possible to look back on for the years to come. Using photographs of her in this work allows her legacy to reach further than she would have ever imagined. Against Our Vanishing perpetuates the idea that the archive can actively preserve memories even long after the subjects in it have ceased to exist.
Over the course of the past year, I’ve learned so much about my family and those in it who have since passed on. While thinking about the subject of their deaths, I've become fixated on how different my life is from what it used to be. I have found myself with a deep and unfillable longing for my childhood. As I’m learning more about myself and my family, as well as where we’ve been and where I’m going, this deep and emotionally charged longing has shown itself to me in numerous different ways. Against Our Vanishing is also a vehicle through which I have been facing the thoughts I’ve been having about time, change, and the ephemerality and fragility of life.
For most of my life, I’ve feared and resisted change. What I’m learning now is that change is necessary, no matter how painful and terrifying it is. When I was 13, moving from southwestern Ohio to central Texas was the worst thing that could’ve ever happened to me. I was leaving everything and everyone I’d ever known and starting over. Now, I’m almost 23 and have been living in Texas for almost a decade. Everything I have experienced in the last decade of my life happened through and because of a multitude of changes that have occurred. I owe everything in my life to change, because without it, this body of work wouldn’t exist.
Creating a fine art photography book to accompany my framed images on the wall was an integral part of fulfilling this body of work. Placing the book within my small part of the gallery space allows for a larger portion of the work to be magnified. The book also allows the viewers to get a more well-rounded experience of my work through an extended sequence of meditative images. This extended sequence also allows the viewers to begin making more close and personal connections with my work. After acknowledging that the subjects and places that my archive depicts are extremely intimate details of my own life and where I come from, it has been very compelling to consider the viewer picking out bits and pieces of my history that resonate with their own
My hope for this body of work is to further the importance of the archive. Along with many forms of analog photography, physical books have become a kind of commodity in the present digital age. Because of how reliant we have become on technology, physical books are becoming obsolete. The aspect of tangibility that comes with reading and holding a physical book has been stripped away. Creating a book containing this body of work allows the passage of time itself to become a tangible object that can be physically experienced.
