the specifics might be vague

As a child, my family spent our vacations at my great-grandmother’s farmhouse. I remember riding my bike down the dirt roads, picking apples, riding on the tractor, going fishing, opening presents at Christmas, and exploring the fields. A few of those memories might actually be stories my father told me of his childhood, yet each holds a visual in my mind. Each time we access a memory, we rewrite the moment. The very act of remembering alters the facts. This process, called reconsolidation, makes the image a bit more blurry and malleable, a retelling of the last time we shared the memory. the specifics might be vague explores the role images play with truth and distortion in our memory.

Truth and authenticity have always been entangled with photography. The photographer both conceals and reveals, curating the images of our lives. Family albums hold defining moments of our lives, like birthdays, weddings, and vacations. Images often spark memories and stories, overwriting any truth we may seek. With the increasing ease in the use of artificial intelligence and digital manipulation, images help create your desired memory. Using analog photographs from my family archive, I re-record them as digital files and pixelate each image by hand, blurring some areas while others remain visible, shaping the image into a new narrative. This process mirrors the reconsolidation process, altering the image and memory each time. Many of these images are not my own, but the time spent with these memories has given them new life and stories in my mind.

the specifics might be vague began over the last year, with the passing of my great-grandmother, Guelda. At one hundred and two years old, she held a wealth of stories and the photographs to prove it. From enduring the Great Depression, to losing her first husband during World War II, to raising three kids in rural Iowa, her stories were always authentic. Near the end of her life, she sometimes forgot names or places, but photographs would always spark a story. While these images may not be from your family, the curated moments are the same. Memory is flexible and always changing; the only constant is the stories we tell ourselves.

Awarded McNeese Works on Paper Purchase Award, Honorable Mention in Staring at the Cloud: Collage Between Analog and Digital at the Los Angeles Center for Photography.