ומה-יפה ירושתנו

How Beautiful Our Heritage

My youth was a cavalcade of moments captured on film that emblazon a life I will yearn to remember. I am using my family's archive of images, along with my own photographs, to produce a body of work leavened by love of family and the sometimes capricious joy of looking at the past.  Family photographs are magical.  They can be intimate and amusing, eccentric and wistful, or uncanny and illuminating.  You can see someone dramatically age by the turn of a page or find an expression or gesture that seems to have been passed down like some precious keepsake escaping the tarnishes of time.  Of course, the images can be saturated with nostalgia and over-the-top design and fashion sense, but ultimately, they are about binding generations together.

I am well aware of the fact that other people’s families are usually not nearly as interesting to look at as one's own.  I have curated the past with a severe eye to find the most visually compelling images.  I combined the archival family photographs with my own images that employ re-enactment strategies, finding the telling detail, harnessing a gesture or a look, or just happenstance.  These photographs combine to evoke the joy of looking at images. Ultimately, this project serves as a love letter to the members of my family, past and present.