Research in the archives gave answers to the facts but how to put this into photography I didn’t know. I started to make photos by associating but also went to places where she’s been living. In the workshop I hoped to be given direction in this project, about how my photography can be used to tell this story.
I got the assignment to write down all the facts about the life of my ancestors including my mother’s, my own and my daughter’s.
Besides that, Michael Ackerman advised me to read W.G. Sebald, who’s integrated (old) photographs in his novels, resulting in a combination of facts and fiction. The use of text in a project like this is inevitable and may be the best starting point. The facts of the story can give the freedom to accumulate images which can lead to a multi-layered story. To make it more personal I can inlcude my daughter in the project, for example.
But what to present in the final portfolio then? My older series ‘wonder’ consists of 53 images, of locations where humans are key, but are hardly ever present. My problem with this work is that they are all single images put together, which is convincing in style and feeling of the images, but there is no bigger story or project with a beginning and an end. For me, that was the reason to attend the workshop. How to make use of my way of photographing things in a predefined project? The answer I got this week is that this isn’t always necessary. The single images can always be made parallel to certain projects and can even be integrated in a project. For the portfolio I combined some images of the ‘wonder’ series with newer material and with images I made in Paris during the workshop. Together they make a new chapter.
