Family photography can memorialize milestones, plague family members, reassure doubts, and inform descendants of extraordinary historical pasts. Yet single pictures can also swell in significance and overshadow lived memories of the same events, exerting a disproportionate effect over how we remember and see ourselves. This project fixates on one picture of the filmmaker as a child on a bike. This snapshot overwhelmingly colors her memory of herself as a five-year-old, an age at which a few spotty memories have survived.
Closely cut copies function as a visual way of expressing how this one image has expanded in power in her memory. The full photograph in the back morphs outward to achieve a three-dimensional presence. In doing so, the piece also speaks to the imperfect way we remember. Little details may feature prominently, while the full picture remains elusive, eventually unable to fulfill its illusion of wholeness.
