What Remains Beneath the Surface

Through the material transformation of archival family photographs buried in soil, this project explores the fragile nature of memory, the persistence of childhood trauma, and the ways painful personal histories are concealed, altered and erased.

My photographic project takes my husband’s family photo archive as its point of departure. Very few photographs have survived from his childhood, as he grew up in a disadvantaged family of ten children in Transylvania, living in extreme poverty. He rarely speaks about this period of his life and has largely buried its painful memories deep within himself.

In my work, I explore the workings of memory and the ways in which trauma continues to live within the depths of the human psyche.

I re-photographed the surviving family photographs with an analogue camera and then projected their negatives onto light-sensitive photographic paper in the darkroom. Before fully developing the images, I buried the partially exposed photographic papers in the soil of our garden for several days. In this way, the latent images, together with the painful memories of childhood, were placed beneath the surface of the earth.

The moisture, biological activity, and chemical composition of the soil directly affected the surface of the photographic emulsion before the images were finally developed in the darkroom. The resulting photographs are fragile visual traces of my husband’s family memory.

In this process, the soil became an active collaborator in the making of the work. It conceals, alters, and, in some places, destroys the visual information, echoing the way in which we often attempt to bury family trauma within ourselves.