My father often carried a camera to document his daily walks, hikes, and familial occasions. I recall rifling through overflowing shoeboxes of those pictures as a kid, experiencing the wonder of a physical print and the stories that accompanied them. As time passed throughout my adolescence, the desire to reflect on those pictures became less and less.
As a consequence of un-managed, non-archival storage in my parent's attic over the decades, those prints experienced frequent shifts in humidity and temperature, as well as accidental damages from improper handling. A separate collection of photographs, predominantly focused on our family, were favored and well-maintained elsewhere in the house.
The further away I moved from the place I grew up, the more I thought about these pictures and the moments they captured; my recollections were ultimately as fragmented as the actual prints became. Despite the distance between myself and my childhood home, I made an effort to visit whenever possible. Brief moments of catching up with family and flicking through old pictures brought back the sense of awe I felt decades ago; the irreversible yet strangely beautiful damages to these prints allude to that same feeling.
Pieced together with scenes of familiar places and homesick feelings, Bsides Family is an ill-preserved collection of family photographs that have been re-appropriated with thoughts of the past.
Project coming to the web soon…