Things of My Father, Contact Grids

An examination of my eccentric father's life through photographs of objects, shot on film, made into analog contact sheets, scanned, cropped into grids, and printed digitally.

Through the process of clearing my father’s cluttered house and studio of 54 years, I gathered boxes of unique objects. In my studio, I have been photographing these various items over a light box onto black-and-white film, to remember the eccentric artist and the backdrop of my childhood. As I assessed the images on the contact sheets, I marveled at the unplanned relationships across frames and rows; the objects were communicating with each other. I began to isolate sections of frames, without altering their original sequence. Once the analog contact sheets are scanned, I can digitally crop and then print the re-contextualized grids. As I continue to shoot rolls of my father’s things, I am increasingly thinking ahead, assembling his former possessions with their order in mind to generate more specific visual interactions and conversations. Some of the objects are personal, some are mundane, some are simply aesthetic, and cumulatively, they are echoes of a life.