Found Lost
2009/2011 · Photo albums, C-prints
2009/2011 · Photo albums, C-prints
Found Lost turns attention towards the blank spaces in three found photograph albums. Through photographs of these gaps, the work considers absence, memory and the incomplete histories that personal archives carry.
The photograph album gives personal images an order, arranging people, places and occasions into a history that can be revisited and shared. Its blank spaces interrupt that sequence, leaving the relationship between what remains and what is missing open to interpretation.
Found Lost takes these spaces as its subject. Detached from the people who assembled them, the albums offer only partial access to the lives they once helped describe. The gaps invite speculation, while withholding the images and explanations that might resolve it.
Photographing these absences creates another layer of preservation: an image of a space where an image might be expected. The work asks how much of a personal history resides in its photographs, and how much emerges through their arrangement, their omissions and the attention of a later viewer.