Where have you been today?

Is the reality perceived by someone with dementia less real than our own? Can photography give authority to this alternate reality?

This research, sparked by my newfound relationship with my dementia-affected grandfather Raymond, investigates the family album - often perceived as an unquestionable document - in order to uncover its ambiguities and to question photography in itself as the most trustful record of reality. The inaccuracy of a medium that aims for objectiveness and is perceived as the bearer of truth, leads me to focus on a different way of approaching the family archive and the relationship between mortality and memory. By using a mix of photography and photogrammetry, Ray's distorted memories - as he recounted them from his hospital bed as I would ask him daily Where have you been today? - became new images in order to materialise his present parallel truth. Alongside this dreamlike everyday, what has survived of Ray's past is contained in a briefcase: 254 photographs that have been transformed into postcards, travelling keepsakes, ready to be sent. If photography is in itself unreliable, why should the reality of a person who has lost his memory be any less real than our own?

Here you can find the complete diary of the project