The Sum of Us

A visual project that explores the connection between family, memory, and the human condition.

Last year, when my brother went off the rails, lost his apartment, and wound-up living on the street, I found myself pouring over old family photos, as if I might find signs of his mental illness. Maybe I thought the pictures would trigger buried memories and lead to a deeper understanding of him.

But the old pictures didn’t evoke what I’d hoped they would. They needed something more to express what I felt. Around this time, I’d been shooting abstract images of surfaces I found on the street, something like the urban abstractions Aaron Siskind made. There was a power, an emotion even, in my close-ups of peeling posters, squashed greasy bags, crazed scrawl on soaped glass, grime caked on paint stains, a jagged scar of text. This visceral messiness said something to me about the human condition and the erosion of time.

Without quite understanding what I was doing, I began layering my street abstractions with family photos, some old and some recent. I inhabited the settings of family photos with these visceral textures. They became part of the environment. They settled into our clothes and streaked across our skin and hair, a patina of time, a metaphor for mortality.

As memory and emotion were mashed with imagination, stories took shape and the project spread beyond my brother. Enfolding the family, it traced identity across generations back to my mother’s estranged father who disappeared when she was a child and started a new family in a distant town. This man I never met appears dimly outlined in layers beneath my brother, their faces overlapping. My grandfather’s ripples project out to my mother’s fear of abandonment, and to my bumpy, disjointed childhood which I observed from a distance with glazed eyes and an open mouth.

Artist Tala Madani’s statement about her work being excavated from her psyche resonates with my process. Creating these visual meditations is therapy, a means of reckoning with who we are and how we connect across time.