The Other Stories, Artist Statement

My dad is one of the most skilled photoengravers in the United States. My grandfather gave me his 1952 Hasselblad when I first started making pictures. My great-grandfather photographed our family and labor movements extensively throughout his lifetime. So, when I published my first monograph last year, it felt like inheritance fulfilled. 

But what else does one inherit from their family? Is it only the positive, the good stuff -- stories worth repeating? Down the same lineage, I inherited my great-grandfather’s photographic archive, approximately 2000 negatives ranging from approximately 1900 to the 1960s in a variety of formats. About half of the archive is sequenced and documented; the “approved” story. My great-grandfather was working on a book when he passed in 1984. The other half was left almost maligned; randomly tossed into vintage containers -- no discernible narrative. 

George Bratt, my great-grandfather and creator of these negatives, was a self-described poet, creator, and labor champion. He is largely accepted this way by the family as a true patriarch. Growing up apart from the bulk of the family, I heard both these stories and the ones which were not often told, the other stories. In short, my family grapples with a lineage of domestic abuse, substance abuse and neglect which largely traces through my great-grandfather. As I began to restore the archive itself, I wondered whether these taboo stories were visible from the narratives which emerged from the photographs and, if they are, what they might mean to me. Had I also inherited this darkness? What responsibility, if any, do I have to bear witness to this?

With my series tentatively titled “The Other Stories,” I am exploring these questions of whether the hushed stories reveal themselves in the images and what I might take away from them. To do so, I am leveraging mixed media practices on top of the original photographs made by my great-grandfather. Utilizing tears, tape, glue and other techniques to combine and remix the photographs with ephemera from the archive itself, I’m attempting to conjure the untold events which I was not direct witness to but that may have directly or indirectly affected my life. It is as if I’m piecing together multi-generational memories that I can’t quite recall. Each piece is unique, an edition 1 of 1. My goal isn’t to tell the specific stories themselves -- the stories are not mine to tell -- but to open a conversation about the good and bad in families and what our individual truths as descendants may or may not be.