Project Statement

Pomace Series, 2018.

A friend called me the other day to ask if I wanted some old family photos that had been her late husband’s.

A lot of family albums have come into my photograph collection that way. The pictures fade and crumble, and are handed down from generation to generation, and there comes a time when these people’s ancestors, and their stories, are forgotten.

I think that in our time, the forgetting will come upon us more quickly. Thanks to new technology, we can capture each moment with a click of our cell phone camera, but we’ve lost the habit of printing them. At the most, we might store them on a hard drive or on the “cloud.”

With any luck, some family member will hold on to the printed images where we appear, either out of affection or in an effort to understand their roots. They may also fall into the hands of a collector, who will try to recreate the history of each image, observing every detail. But the most likely thing is that the photos will be thrown out, that they’ll end up in the trash when, for example, a “new” family wants to clean house.

On the other hand, while watching old printed pictures, I wonder what would be the feelings of a woman living more than a hundred years ago. How did she express herself or gave her opinion? was she comfortable travelling in those dresses? Did she liked the world she lived in? If she could time travel, would she like our way of living? What would she think about a woman living in a city today? Would she like to stay?