My Grandmother's Keeper

Towards the end of her life, my grandmother only carried a few memories with her. I created this project when my grandmother, who had dementia as a result from Parkinson's, was 90 years old. As she got older, she became an unreliable narrator, sharing stories with me that could've been fact or fiction. 

​

After moving into an assisted living home, my grandparents passed their photo albums on to my mother, who then gave them to me. Every photo allows me small glimpses into my grandmother’s life, a life that, by the time she was 87, she remembered very little of. When I shared these photographs with her, she stared at them blankly, not recognizing her own face. It was almost as if all these recorded moments of the past 90 years never happened.

​

My Grandmother’s Keeper is a collection of images printed with the wet plate collodion process onto glass and backed with black metal. The imperfections in the printing represent how memories become distorted over time: certain details are forgotten, the timeline of events are confused. Memory is a fleeting thing, and these images serve as a memento of moments that have long since passed.