My Childhood Album

I don’t have photos of myself when I was a child. Not with my parents, not with my brothers and sisters. Nothing. I don’t recall my face as a child. One day it hit me: I didn’t remember my childhood because of the lack of visual memoirs. This realization came with an emotional avalanche - I had been not important to my parents. Why didn’t they photograph me? Didn’t they realize that photos were important to build up the family history? Was this emblematic of a disassociated family? I concluded that I didn’t really exist, I was a ghost to my parents, I was not documented . . . I didn’t have a history.

The pain that overtook me was unbearable. I had managed to block out my childhood almost completely, and with this realization my childhood came back to haunt me. What should I do with these newfound feelings? I had to react. I had to create.

I came up with a plan. If I didn’t have a childhood album I could create one. So I started asking friends and family to lend me their childhood photos. Amongst them, I chose some that represented situations I had also experienced. But since I was recreate my memories, I decided that I could also create the experiences I would have wanted to have as a child, but didn’t. I could have it all!

I took portraits of my face with different expressions that would be appropriate with the situations depicted in the memoir photos. I used my adult face, the face that I always remembered, the face that I saw in the mirror every day, the only face I can recall. I then inserted my adult face into the childhood photos of my dreams and created my childhood album.

Using as a base someone else’s memories has enlarged my emotional dimension, not only to create my own memories but to recall also the ones of a loved one.

With this series I began to explore emotional healing processes through photography.