It Is Always Now

It Is Always Now This series, from 1985 to present, is a chronicle of my family, our home and it's environs at the Blue House on Ninigret Pond in coastal Rhode Island.

It Is Always Now – Tria Giovan

Medium: 6 x 9 cm and 6 x 7 cm color negative film

For more than thirty years I have been photographing life at the Blue House on Ninigret Pond. It is what I do when I am there. I photograph the beech tree, wander down to the dock, and shoot the view from the deck outside the kitchen door. I look for the ebbs and flows of light play on the random things strewn about inside. I seek a human element to incorporate into the mix, but that is now increasingly rare as my parents are gone, and the family feels unmoored, scattered to the wind. Perhaps it is a force of habit, but it is my way to feel connected and how I mark the passage of time. As a chronicle of my family, our home and its environs, the interiors reflect personality traits, gestures convey emotion, fleeting moments speak volumes, and the landscape is the stabilizing transcendent component.  Universally they address how a family’s legacy preserved with photographs has a singular point of view, while considering the concept of a collective past.

My practice often involves returning to negatives years later to produce new photographs reexamined through a contemporary framework. Over time, I have varied the constructs created from this body of work as my perspective changes and I am inspired to tell new stories. My mother’s poetry informs this latest incarnation, both in the images’ titles and in their untraditional compositions.

The single images and diptychs drift between different temporal states. The cadence of dialogue shifts within these arrangements like the fluid structure of a poem, where I find resonance, process loss and navigate the emotional terrain of familial relationships. These photographs consider the connection between the spiritual and the material while exploring intimate bonds and the metaphorical possibility of home.