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.
A short film is in progress. Return soon.
Pearl is also a postcard. She's available in the Apothecary… Send her somewhere she'll be kept.