It is human nature to ask who am I? And beyond that, where did I come from? By asking these questions, we try to both understand our connection to this world and ground our identities in long history of our families and forebears.
FamilyTree is a series of portraits that combine two separate photographs of immediate family members into one picture. To accomplish this, individual portraits are made of two family members in similar poses. The negatives are printed at equal size and torn and glued together to make one image of two family members. My technique for assembling this montage is 100% analog – film to paper. No digital manipulation is used to alter or enhance the original images. The two images blend together or don’t.
Families endlessly discuss whether a new baby resembles his or her mother or father, because physical resemblance is the most striking and primary evidence of a genetic connection. The FamilyTree portrait visually maps the genetic characteristics we inherit from our parents and demonstrates how some aspects of our futures were codified at the moment of conception. This composite photograph could be viewed as an eerie life-map as the montage of two different family members is sometimes mistaken for a montage of the same person at ages.