WAKE
This body of work continues from the narrative of the project Stay Warm, Dad. The e-mails exchanged between my father and I persisted regularly until I eventually returned home to America. Once home, the main thing that I'd been wanting to do for months was hug my dad, so I did that. I began making photographs of my dad and I hugging, but in various places of tragic relevance to our financial story (i.e. the storage bin where his belongings reside, his old apartment, the U-Haul rental building). As I continued photographing my dad, the process became intuitively based on my interest in connecting our family's personal story to a larger idea of financial tragedy. My dad would often reiterate the ways in which the media explains our current economy with numbers like 13.4 million unemployed or a 14% unemployment rate, and how there's a severe disconnect between the casual nature of those statistics and his actual situation. I was interested in making a visual connection for people to make sense of this situation rather than through numbers that can't possibly represent any concrete visual for human understanding.
During the process of continuing work based on my family's financial difficulties, a number of deaths occurred within my family. My mother's boyfriend Richie passed away due to cancer, his father figure Uncle Joe passed away from a falling injury at an old age, and my cousin Mark died in a car accident at age 19: each happening in a short series of months. Wake is a photographic narrative that represents these various struggles that have affected my family over the past few years. The book comprises my photographs and writing, along with excerpts of e-mails from my dad while I was abroad. By making metaphorical connections between our present economic time and physical death, I use this work to serve as a kind of elegiac document for these trying experiences. Wake functions as my personal understanding of our situation and an example of a story that is unfortunately familiar to so many others living in this generation.
Excerpt from the book - "I'll be home for Christmas."
Wake is an ongoing body of work and its physical form as an unbound book is constantly evolving.
People living in Chicago are welcome to borrow the book for a two-week period.
This book is part of the Indie Photobook Library and has shown at FotoWeek DC and the Flash Forward Festival.
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Interviews regarding this work:
Geronimo Projects :: Mull it Over
Recognition regarding this work:
Awards :: Magenta Foundation FF :: InFocus Grant :: Albert P. Weisman Award :: The Chicago Project
Mentions :: FlakPhoto :: Conscientious :: The Sonic Blog :: Zitrone Magazin