That moment, the one when we encounter something familiar - yet simultaneously distant and foreign, can leave us discombobulated. A person, an object, or a specific experience can trigger this sensation. It often leaves us feeling uncomfortably strange, lost, and uncertain of our experience. Last summer, the unexpected death of my sister rapidly following the expected passing of my father caused this strange repetition of similar heartache. As with the first death, so with the second, I found myself consumed by questions I had already discovered had no answers, and so I spent most time longing for the unattainable. Being lost, scared, confused, and angry reverted me back to a child-like state, which left me dwelling in an eerie atmosphere of the uncanny.
I have discovered accepting a new reality is necessary to continue on with life, because after all, life is for the living. We can continue living with those who no longer physically exist by carrying them with us in our memory and preserving the tactile remains of their past. I began photographing my family with significant objects symbolic of my dad and sister⎯a means of producing new memories of the living interacting with the dead. However, these new visual memories would not be complete if they did not entail the repetition of emotional suffering associated with losing a loved one.
While using the view camera for my photographic work, I felt I had control over time ⎯ because I was capable of stopping it for that instant, which brought about a sort of catharsis for me. As André Bazin said of preservation, 'by providing a defense against the passage of time it satisfied a basic psychological need in man, for death is but the victory of time.' Storytelling is another defense, because it allows one to continue living. As Hermann Hesse has written, 'If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose.'
