The work investigates the absences of an image. What the pictures doesn’t show? The emptiness, the bitterness and the void.

I revisit the memory of my maternal grandmother, a striking figure in my childhood. Using documents and photographs from the family archive, I find portraits of a young smiling grandmother, completely different from the taciturn person I knew. Photographs, particularly the family ones, capture only good moments, and follow social precepts, such as “putting on a smile. The photos do not reveal the hardships we’ve been through. Photography does not contain life, it’s simply a snapshot of reality, a fragment and never the whole story.

The work talks about what is left out of a photograph, about the memories that do not fit into images. About absence, inverse, and silence. Before, we offered portraits as affective souvenirs. We printed the photos, made albums, and gathered the family to remember moments and stories. The images in the albums enabled narratives beyond the photographic framework, including new meanings each time they were revisited. Images have no body. Currently, photographs are hardly printed anymore. The vast majority remain archived on computers, cell phones and social media, being quickly replaced by others.

... work in progress.