My Mom and 14 Men

Abstract

Pancreatic cancer claimed my mother's life when I was ten. Immediately following her burial, a bed bug infestation in my childhood apartment triggered a disorienting move. My mother's artifacts were placed in boxes and put in the basement of my father's restaurant.

These keepsakes became part of the way I project stories about my mother in her absence. I have built narratives surrounding myself and my mother which I have only acknowledged in my early adulthood to be fantasies, merely stories I have been telling myself about the two of us. I recognize similarities in this unfortunately delusional relationship to my mother I have created with what I've been taught in my undergraduate program about photography. While photographs are tangible objects which we hold, admire, and judge, a photographic subject merely suggests something which we impose meaning onto. Images can only tell me a certain amount of truth about the women in my life for they can't escape being only a representation of something. Pertaining to my mother, I can hold photographs of her, they "exist", but I don't exist in the world my mother photographed and was photographed in. In this project I consider my grievances and ability to tell false tales about myself and my family's history, yet my intentions while photographing were fully indulgent in the fantasy. I insert myself not as an objective archivist but as an unreliable narrator, a voyeur, and a daughter searching for answers. At its essence, I consider my thesis a posthumous collaboration with my mother.