Julia Vandenoever Shares a Touching Project About Her Complex Relationship With Her Brother

I wonder every day if my brother Jamie, who has a substance abuse disorder, is dead or alive. Our last phone call was in August 2018. I have never known life without my younger brother, he was always there. Our relationship is the reason I have two children; I couldn't imagine life without a sibling, but I can now. 

While I Wait is my emotional journey through ambiguous loss. It describes the experience of those left to grieve someone who is alive, or gone, but not indefinitely.  Our last conversations were painful and confusing for me.  When Jamie texted, "You ain't my sister no more" his words stung with no relief. We share the same blood, but am I still a sister? 

I am in limbo, where closure is not an option. By combining my own images, archival photographs, and Jamie's text messages, I explore what love looks like for someone who is waiting, remembering, searching and questioning. The story might change, and I hope it will, but I have to wait for the next chapter. This is an elegy to a lost relationship between a brother and a sister.

Words and pictures by Julia Vandenoever  

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Julia Vandenoever is a photo-based artist whose work is generated from a personal perspective exploring themes of memory, identity, place, and home. 

Julia was a 2021 and 2022 Critical Mass finalist.  Her first monograph, Still Breathing, was acquired by Smith College Rare Books Library and exhibited at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. 

Recently, Julia was an artist-in-residence at the Boulder Creative Collective. She also completed a book dummy of this work through a masterworkshop at the PHMuseum. Follow her on Instagram and PhMuseum.

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This feature is part of Story of the Week, a selection of relevant projects from our community handpicked by the PhMuseum curators.