My work is about memory, the passage of time, mortality, and the photograph’s role in shaping our experience of loss. Photography’s unique ability to capture a fleeting moment allows it to expose the temporality of life. “By giving me the absolute past of the pose… the photograph tells me death in the future… I shudder over a catastrophe which has already occurred.” These words from Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida precisely describe how I feel when I consider a photograph so old that the subject must be dead. My response has a number of layers: I feel an immediate connection to the living person in the photograph, followed by a dread of what inevitably is to come for them, completed by a sense of grief over what has, of course, already transpired. This reaction is why my work utilizes found photographs, which I manipulate to create a narrative exploring mortality. My work aims to question the nature of photographs and challenge the traditional definition of photography.
