Reliquien: MFA Thesis - Photography and Related Media

Abstract

My father lives in a town I can not get lost in. He still inhabits my childhood home, surrounded by a collection of objects and photographs arrayed as shrines to his American Dream. Both the town and the man seem alien to me now. This village could be anywhere in New England, it is generic in its quirkiness. Chock full of its own altars to cultural ideas and heavy with an American artifice of place. Photographs, much like memories, degrade over time but still reach for a truth. This is not a perfect objective truth, but a personal one both conflicted and contradictory, this is America after all.