Shortly after my her death I found myself sorting through a box of negatives she had saved from when she was a young woman, before she was my mother. While handling these fragile objects I wondered what these negatives meant to her, why she had saved them. As she was not longer there to ask, my questions remain unanswered. Photography is often associated with preserving memory, yet memories are intangible; you can not touch them. The memory attached to these pictures are now inaccessible.

For this project, I chose to place the negatives on a scanner bed and scan them as objects, not as images, or “As Is”. I intentionally obscure from the viewer what is pictured. Fingerprints, dust and scratches, on both the film and the scanner bed, hold the traces of those that have touched them over time. While every picture tells a story, it is not necessarily ours to tell.

They say that at the end of life, the beginning returns. The two darknesses merge and the distance between the two collapses. If sorrow and beauty are connected, it may lie within the texture of longing. This project, for me, becomes a mapping of that empty space.