For a while now I’ve been collecting found footage, discarded images that once belonged to family archives, and repurpose them giving them a new meaning and a place in my own work.
I received an archive of thousands of color slides, boxes filled with images from different places and times. I don’t know much about the original owner, or in fact, I almost know nothing about her. These images have become abandoned and it was now my obligation to re create them and bring them a new purpose.
In this body of work, I looked through the archive of thousand of images, in order to find moments in time where Mary captured the same scene more than once. This allowed me to create her vision, her eyes, try and capture the moment she tried to convey through her lens.
My work process is, in a sense, an abuse of the medium of photography. I adopt abandoned, forgotten and misplaced family moments captured in discarded images, and then willfully appropriate and reclaim them as my own. My photographs represent my search for belonging within a space I create.
Mary’s chains together random color slides to tell, internationally, a partial photographic story that can never be fully completed as the time and its people are long gone from these frames.
Vanessa Norton says
I love these.