Remember Me Like This (2017 - Ongoing)

16 images Created 30 Aug 2018

As casual and personal in nature as family photo albums often are, they represent extremely selective experiences and fragments of our past and are no less deliberate and contrived. Rather than being faithful documents of family history and personal memories, “Remember Me Like This” reveals how family photo albums are more about our shared human desires to remember and be remembered in certain ways.

“Remember Me Like This” is based on a collection of old black and white family photographs that I discovered at my grandmother’s house in China. They were taken between the early 40s and early 80s, prior to I was born. I rephotographed and printed selected photos from this collection as silver gelatin prints, and hand painted them with ink and gouache. Each in turn becomes a unique piece of painted artwork. The physical manipulations of photographs and the motif of dots obscuring the faces altered the original nature and function of the medium. These family photos are no longer about the individuals captured. They become photography’s poetic moment of truth – symbolic and metaphorical. They demand the viewers to reflect on what we desire to remember and be remembered by.
View: 100 | All