This body of work is an exploration of the way in which my memory has evolved throughout my life. Growing up, I spent a lot of time looking through old family photo albums with my mother. The stories that I heard during rambunctious Thanksgiving dinners and the photos that I’ve spent years examining are now woven into my experience as a young black woman. Although I didn’t always recognize the people in the images, I often felt I had the capacity to remember them as family, even if I’d never met them. Now that I’m older, I find myself having a difficult time separating my own memories from the ones I seem to have inherited from loved ones. My goal for this project was not to directly imitate my family archive, but rather extract the key elements that stood out to me as a child – whether that be an object, a place or a special occasion. I’ve composed these photos with the intent of evoking sentimentality and nostalgia through the lens of familial bonding.
