While a photograph does not restore the past, in the sentimental context of the family album it does affirm that the past existed. A Photograph cannot be re-lived, it is not a resurrection of a moment, or of the pictured person. This untouchable past is meaningful only to those who remember it. Without the context of living memory to testify to the significance of the moments and people captured, a photograph is just another indifferent object.

This photograph is a sentimental collaboration made with my immediate family - my mother, Julianne. My father was never present in my life, my grandparents who helped raise me have now passed away and I am an only child.

My Family is a complex and layered image, much like all familial realities. Many of the facets that make this photograph precious to me are wound up in its materiality as an object. Made on a 3D printed 4x5 camera which was gifted to me by one of my closest friends, on photo paper that I inherited from a distant relative, presented in a frame that was hand-made by a friend, this work contains sentimentality and significance which is not evident in the image to anyone but me. My Family does not fit to the accepted tropes of family images, instead referencing the formulaic language of early anthropological photography. Silvered, obscured with damage and chemical degradation, and literally negative, this solitary portrait of my mother is both an intimate, personal collaboration and a defiance of expected norms, not just of family photographs, but of family in general. The image is not a reproduction or a copy, but is presented as the original negative image… a play of language which mirrors the negative images of single mothers that still pervade discourse.

The subtitle of the work, (most stubborn bitch I’ve ever met) was a hilarious gift given to me in one of the few conversations I’ve had with my father. Delivered with a sentiment somewhere between frustration and respect, this description of my mother has become a sort of hereditary badge of honour within our family lineage. My mother, Grandmother and I had a running joke that heritable stubbornness was our most pervasive trait, and to hear it from my father, a complete outsider to our family dynamic, was oddly affirming. The statement, most stubborn bitch I’ve ever met, became a sort of soothing shared identity between three generations of otherwise different women.