in memory
This body of work began in grief.
After an unexpected loss, I was tasked with assembling a photo memorial — sorting through hundreds of images of someone I loved. Somewhere in that process, I stopped being able to recognize him. I later learned this was a trauma response: the mind's way of protecting itself from what it cannot yet hold.
In the months that followed, I began photographing people around me. The portraits were simple and direct — no expressions, just a person looking straight into the camera. I shot on film and processed it in a darkroom that became, over the course of that summer, as much a place of grief as of making.
For each portrait, I applied a paintable darkroom emulsion directly onto paper by hand. The image only develops where the emulsion has been brushed — leaving other areas blank, absent, unexposed.
I didn't fully understand what I was making while I was making it. That clarity has only come with time. I was trying to reconcile the impossible fact of someone being here, and then suddenly not here anymore. These portraits gave me the time and space to sit with that — to move through grief at the pace that grief actually requires.
