"Time: History, Futurity, Nowness, and Duration (Untitled)" (2021)
Time can be experienced and interpreted in many different ways. Analyzing the history, the present, and/or the future of any one thing can prove to be quite interesting.
In this series of three photographic diptychs, I am analyzing the relationship between a mother and daughter at the same age. I am currently 20 years old in 2021 and my mom was 20 in 1986. As I get older I realize how similar I am to my mom; from the little mannerisms, to things I say, to the values that I believe in. I used this opportunity as a study of the relationship between the past and the present, looking through a generational lens.
In the prompt, there is a question that states, “When does something become history?” This collection answers that question in a more personal matter by basically saying that a mother’s life becomes history as her child grows older. I am experiencing the age of 20, one that she experienced 35 years ago; in the same way that I will experience 55, her current age, 35 years in the future; and she will experience 83, the age of my grandma, in 28 years. Adding to that, my own life will become history when my future children reach the age I am now, and the ages I have already lived through.
Moving away from the conceptual side and into the more technical side of this work, I took images from my mom’s scrapbooks from when she was my age, and paired those side by side to recreations of those images of her, with me instead of my mom. I then edited the images of me to try to match the color scheme and grainy nature of the original images of my mom from the ‘80s. I mainly wanted it to feel like a comparison between the past and the present, not a repetition of the past, so I didn’t want to exactly recreate every single detail of the older photographs.
Overall, this collection studies time through the concept of age and aging. And, on a personal level, studies time through that same concept of age, just by looking more personally at me and my mom.
