UNCLAIMED ANCESTORS
Unclaimed Ancestors is a series of rescued vernacular photographs: images of the dead, found abandoned in thrift stores, estate sales, and the aftermath of other people's forgetting.
I am their curator now, and their witness.
The project explores the ethics of memory in an age of collapse. Who do we carry forward? What do we refuse to forget? What futures become possible because we remembered?
Pearl
I found you after you died.
People were moving through your home, opening drawers, sorting through what remained. Off to the side was a box of your photos, left behind.
That was the moment that stayed with me. How quickly a life can be touched and released. I took a box of your photographs home.
In them, you begin to show up for me in fragments. You loved your dogs. Tenderly, joyously. You loved to cook. There were cookbooks from everywhere. You were trying the world from your kitchen.
These are the pieces I have of you. And maybe because I don’t have your full story, it made me wonder, do we ever have the full story of anyone? Even those still living. Even those we love.
Pearl, you were the beginning of this.
Since you, I have found others. Faces in bins, in markets, in the remains of homes emptied too quickly. But you were the first time I felt the rupture. The first time I understood how easily we are separated from the things that once proved we were here.
I took your photographs home. I am still holding them. This project is for you.
Pearl is also a postcard. She's available in the Apothecary… Send her somewhere she'll be kept.
Young Man
You are wearing a suit that says I am someone. Your tie is dark and ordered. You look directly at the camera. At me, now. As though you were already leaning toward the life waiting just beyond the frame.
But I found you in a thrift shop. Unnamed. Untethered from any story but the one your face still carries: you were young. You were full of becoming.
Someone arranged for you to sit in this studio. Your suit was carefully pressed. You posed. And I can see it in the way you hold yourself, in the steadiness of your gaze that you are brimming with youth. You’re Alive. You inhabited the moment before the shutter closed. You were present.
The roots are there because I cannot believe that a life simply ends where memory does. Somewhere beneath the visible world, what we have loved continues to feed what comes after. Remembrance works that way too.
I don't know where your life carried you after this photograph. I don't know whether your becoming unfolded the way you imagined while standing here in your pressed suit and careful tie. I don't know who loved you or who grieved for you. But I know this: you were here. Light touched your face. Time held still for the smallest fraction of a second. And against every odd that followed, this image survived.
Today, so do you. I am holding you now. I am remembering you forward.
The Conversation
The Conversation
You were never meant to outlive the people who spoke you.
You were made of breath, of pauses, and glares, and subtle gestures with the eyes. You were carried across cigarette smoke, through condensation in beer cans, and checkered tablecloths. You moved from voice to voice, changing shape as each person answered.
Like all conversations, you should’ve evaporated into memory. But someone thought to press a shutter. And here we are. How many years later, and wondering who you were. You might have been about money, or leaving home, or who was sick. Or whether the world was changing too fast. You might have been about absolutely nothing at all.
Whatever shapes you took, the people who made you are gone now. Their voices have returned to the earth. Whatever certainty they held, whatever joke made them laugh on the drive home, whatever silence settled between them afterward, all of it disappeared with them.
Only this photograph remembers that you happened. Every family is shaped by conversations that history never records.
And somehow, you survived, and we remember you forward.
