12 March 2021, blue sky, neighbors
My intentions thus far with this project are shifting slightly. I’ve found that the analysis of the house itself changing over time in its transition from being my grandmother’s to my sister’s can be addressed as a visual representation of our family’s ongoing experience with my grandmother’s dementia and isolation.
Taking these sequence of photographs was strangely more emotionally taxing than my first experience of documenting the interior of the house. I parked my car in the street to keep it out of frame, and immediately could tell the neighbors were watching.
The neighbors in question, however, are close family friends – Pam and Gary and Brenda have been part of our family’s story since before my father was born and grew up in that house. They’ve intimately seen the entire sequence our family is experiencing. I know them, they know me, and Brenda’s nod of understanding from her kitchen window meant more than I can say. Her late husband, a photographer for our local paper, was fond of documenting change in unexpected places, so Brenda knows the process well.
Working between the ideas of absence and presence, and emotionally responding to the contents of the photo albums my grandmother left, I worked this week to capture the presentation of the house itself. The images are not meant to specifically be beautiful or tragic or any one emotion in between, but to evoke some form of feeling in the viewer. Whether that be nostalgia for a place missed, frustration at disarray, or anything else, the emotional ambiguity I feel present in these photographs can be seen as evoking the emotional ambiguity of our family’s current experiences.
