Uncovering unknown roots

Since its inception, photography has engaged our notion of time in a dynamic dance, and sometimes it is unclear which partner is in control. You might expect the photographic documentto be beholden to time, subject to whatever physical artifacts are displayed at the given moment; however, for almost as long as people have known how to fx an image permanently to flm, practitioners of photography have taken liberties by manipulating and staging their subjects toconform to their visions. My objective is to imagine history as it once was and question how it has fixed within the present.

I use a 4 x 5” still camera to re-animate my ancestry, as the photographer and model who assumes the roles of my kin. We journey to the American South and the North East, the sites of my ancestors’ immigration from Europe. This series conveys an American Dream-like trajectory, and a narrative which is at once specific to my own genealogy and universal in the arc it describes. Whether illustrating the spare, unadorned rooms and moody landscapes of my Irish settings, orthe ornate, lush, and affluent surroundings of the American South, my compositions are rich and precisely detailed. I carefully choreograph each aspect of the photograph, from the clothes, props, and settings, to the way light moves into the frame. The use of available light—the glow of midday against a window, a sky electrified by a setting sun, or a fireplace crackling with warm fames—is confident and seductive. It becomes another character within my scenes. While I step into the homes and vestments that once belonged to my ancestors, I do not attempt to conceal the contemporary moment in which the photographs are made. By using color film and only myself as a model, I face the anachronism implicit to my process. It is clear that this is not the actual past we are viewing, that my invention and emulation evoke an imagined revisiting of one’s fiction and truth. The tension that exists in the space between document and fabrication are where these photographs reside.