Embodying the Fact and Fiction of my Ancestry

Embodying the Fact and Fiction of my Ancestry is a photographic series that explores my longing for connection to my bloodline. The theme of memory and the changing aesthetic of photography with time are also explored through these performative self-portraits.

Embodying the Fact and Fiction of my Ancestry is a photographic series that explores my longing for connection to my bloodline. The theme of memory and the changing aesthetic of photography with time are also explored through these performative self-portraits. This series was inspired by the amazement that I had little to no information about the women who existed in my bloodline, and whose existence was necessary for my own. I am half English and half Egyptian, but my own heritage seems foreign to me as my immediate family immigrated to Canada while I was still very young. I started speculating with my mother about her knowledge of her English family tree, as both her parents have passed, I had no one but my mother to collect memories from except our dusty family album. On my Egyptian side, I had many questions to ask my grandmother about her own life, and the life of her grandmothers. With the regret of forgetting the only common language between my grandmother and I, my father began to help as an intermediator. Questions were forgotten and long answers became short, and I was left with not much more information than I had at the start. My imagination soon came to fill in the missing gaps, and I found myself visualizing the lineage I had been yearning to connect with. In this project, I traced the “could have been” lives of both my grandmothers, their grandmothers, and ultimately the grandmothers of their grandmothers.

With an uncanny resemblance between all six performative self-portraits, the series truly is meant to confuse the viewer with the visual elements that are at play. During the time of the photographs creation, I imagined myself as each woman I have depicted, at the age I currently am. In each photograph I see a performance, a self-portrait, and a portrait of a woman I wish I knew. Themes of memory, and loss of true living memory, become clear when recreating the aesthetic of the physical appearance of the photographs. The photographs when in their final form are artifacts in themselves - ones that can be lost, can be found, and can be broken.

Although the living memories of the women of my ancestry have been ephemeral, my wonder for them will be embedded in this work as an everlasting symbol of appreciation.