The Shore

The Shore explores how family conflict shapes identity and emotional balance.

Family /ˈfamɪli,ˈfam(ə)li/
A family can take years to build, yet a single moment, or a single person, can fracture it. For a long time, I could see the shore, but caught in the perpetual tide of familial tensions, I was unable to reach it. Pulled back again and again by waves of conflict that were never mine to carry, I became an unwilling participant in a drama I had no desire even to witness.

The Shore investigates this uneasy position, how one seeks a place as a child, a sister, and a woman within a family structure shaken by unresolved histories. It is both a confrontation and a release: an attempt to navigate inherited turmoil while reclaiming my own narrative.

To embody this process, I turned to wet plate collodion, creating unique self-portraits on glass. This fragile and unpredictable technique mirrors the instability of the emotional landscape I grew up in. The plates require a dark background to become visible; for this, I gathered images of la mer (the sea), a word that in my mother tongue echoes la mère (the mother). This linguistic overlap became a conceptual anchor: the sea as both origin and threat, a place of submersion and potential rebirth.

The sea in which I felt myself drowning, and from which I attempted to escape, is rendered through analog prints produced with solarisation in the darkroom. This intervention disrupts the image, introducing flashes, reversals, and gradients that evoke rupture, memory distortion, and the tension between clarity and opacity.

The Shore is an intimate, cathartic work. Each image is deliberately small (12 cm), inviting close, almost secretive viewing, reflecting the scale at which familial wounds often operate: quiet, persistent, deeply internal.