Departing from Roland's Barthes's words, I began to re-examine the conventions of photography and the materiality of photographs with this body of work. As Barthes relates his devastating experience trying to recapture his mother through a series of images, I couldn't help but relate his experience to the loss of my grandmother, a Holocaust survivor. As he "was struggling among images partially true and therefore totally false."
I began to see how none of the images collected of my grandmother could begin to encapsulate her identity, or could even begin to articulate the spaces and places that I remembered her belonging to. The work also began to involve other individuals that I have loved and lost in my life including my late stepsister and a past partner. With their loss in mind, I began questioning the ultimate stability of the photograph as image and document. How can this fetishized indexical object be as fleeting and ephemeral as memory itself?
