Nana's and Nene's

Artists are often concerned with ideas of conservation and preserving the past. Since I have become known as the “photographer” of the family I have taken on the immense responsibility of cataloguing memories for everyone else. I am expected to document the events and rituals of family life in a way that is suited to our memories which obviously means leaving out the things that no one wants to remember. But I can recall a time in my childhood when picture taking seemed more carefree and the only instant gratification was with a Polaroid. Back then your family would shoot a roll of film, receive prints in a couple of days and open the package with anticipation. Even if half of the roll was crap your mom still put them all in a shoebox because you paid money for those prints. Twenty years later those accidents and terrible, fuzzy, awkward pictures are the ones that are so fascinating. They thrill me more than anything on a First Friday art walk and for this reason I am intrigued with Rachel Albright’s exploration and re-appropriation of her family photographs. Rachel speaks with genuine interest of her grandmother’s life before she was her “Nene”. The same thoughts about my Nana have always fascinated me. I think back to the photographs that I have seen of her as a young woman in the 1930’s. There is a shroud of mystery about the old photos of our loved ones and an eerie feeling as if time were suspended and you can see both their past and future all at once. Re-photographing these old images is an interesting way to make them tell a story. Some of the images Rachel had picked last semester already seemed like movie stills and became increasingly cinematic when put into a sequence. Revisiting the past for inspiration is not a new idea in the art world, but it can generate ideas and answer questions about identity for an artist. I am interested in learning more about what Rachel discovers of her family history and if she will introduce sound, text or film into the project. Another angle that could reveal something may be finding the county records of her family’s land to see if anything of interest happened there over the generations or to find out what it was before her family owned it.