from a sketchbook, 1989
Some days ago I have posted a project by Debbie Grossman.
The words accompanying her work went like this:
When my mother died, I was struck by the idea that all the marks she had ever made would be all the marks she’d ever make. The few letters I had from her, banal as they were, suddenly took on a precious significance. In Postmark, I used my mother’s handwriting as the material with which to create new objects and impossible documents.
Grossmans work touched me.
I remembered my mother who committed suicide when I was 15, and I remembered my helpless attempts to find photographic images for my loss.
The photographs I made then are probably lost, but I found some lines I have written then.
from a sketchbook put together 1989
Looking through the sketchbooks I made during the time at the University,
I found a forgotten attempt of mine to find images and words for all those things one can´t actually take pictures of.
This sketchbook of mine never found any echo…
and I never followed up this thread, not in this manner.
The children I photographed then for my exam in a project called “remembering” picked up a sadness I had avoided to sense. The color of the images, the clothing of the children I photographed bears the marks of the past. Some could have held this for nostalgia, but it wasn´t.
You can´t take photographs of the past.
