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As I Find Her: My Mother & Me
I’ve always thought of my mother, Joanna, as a constant in my life. I’ve never lived in a world in which she was not there, guiding me, caring for me, loving me. She had a similar relationship with her mother, Maria. I was with her when her mother died, and as I watched the pain of grief come over her again and again, glimpses of her as a child came into view. It brought the fullness of her life, and specifically her life before me, into a new perspective.
In Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day, Delmore Schwartz writes:
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn…)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(... that time is the fire in which we burn.)
This ongoing body of work is my attempt at exploring and preserving who my mother is, as my constant and as Joanna. Looking back with her, looking at her, and looking at us at the same time. We are constants in each other’s lives, evolving separately and together, yet so much is the same. How does this happen? How do time and age and life experience change us, and in what ways do they not? How does photography allow us to process and confront the passage of time, and how does it fall short?