The People We Come From and the People We Become

I began photographing my family in 2018 as my family moved out of my childhood home. My brother, who had just narrowly graduated high school, was pushed out of the house on moving day, in hopes that forced independence would help him find purpose past marijuana. Freshly out of college, I moved into my first apartment a month later. When I came home to visit I found my camera gravitating most towards my brother and my mother. For as long as I can remember, their relationship has been a contentious one, there is too much of them in each other. My father and I have long been the bystanders, the even-keeled members of the family. My mother and brother, meanwhile, both of whom struggle with mood disorders and neither of whom have found healthy ways of coping with it, challenge each other at every turn. Their similarities lead to a constant confrontation that becomes cyclical in nature; neither is willing to bend and so the conflict is never resolved.

This ongoing series is an exploration of their relationship, and of its effect on our family as a whole. Part documentary and part fine-art, it seeks to understand my mother’s experience of weathering the storm of parenthood, my brother’s experience being raised by an emotionally unstable mother, my role in each of their lives as confidant and witness, and our growth through the years. In constructing scenes wherein I ask these two members of my family to perform the socially expected aspect of family of embracing, I am exerting control over their relationship by projecting a fantasized reconciliation, attempting to replace the tensions and traumas of the past. But I am also seeking to emphasize the artifice of photography in this depiction: what we see is not their relationship, at least not all of it. The love may be real, but the harmony is not.