Family Portrait

The theme for this project was 'momento mori'. Our task was to go out and find whatever old family photographs, negatives and belongings, that dealt with family memories, and to rework these objects into new images thus incorporating the old with the new.

I came across these two old family portraits that were taken from when we were on sabbatical in North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in the States. I felt that, with these ridiculous looking photographs, I should emphasize the 'kitsch' and 'tackiness' of it's aesthetic. It was merely a process of manipulation that was undergone with the use of the original photograph. In this way it portrays this image as a type of farce, or play on a type of reality that was experienced during that time, and a reality that is still very much in motion to this day.

These images are a metaphorical parody on commercialism and pop culture, and in representing this, I decided to utilize subject matter particular pertinent to my family history, thus triggering the memory of a certain time in my life.

These images were the starting point of a corpus of work that I created for my final year portfolio involving the manual manipulation of found images, objects and negatives.