what is lost...what has been

What is lost …what has been is a visual soliloquy to ‘absent friends’, people I considered my family. The works are also a coda to my installation ‘in the sweet bye & bye’ which was a photographic cathexis in response to the death of my closest friend in Dec 2017. His death brought back memories of my father’s close friend, who died some years before. The autoethnographic process of weaving one’s personal history into a visual dialogue is useful to explore photography’s tendency towards memorialisation and also to analyse ideas of belonging/otherness, mourning and melancholia in relation to the photographic family album. As an academic, I was critical of what the ‘family album’ represented in terms of normality and otherness so there is little photographic evidence to represent the 36 years that my husband Peter and I have spent together. As Peter is now in his late 80s and almost 30 years my senior, there seemed to be an urgency to make work together exploring concepts of couples and family representation. The performative gestures I would describe as tragi/comic, depicting an ‘odd couple’. But this couple at odds with their environment also evokes “anticipatory grief,” of a couple who are at a different point in life’s journey. “Even before the loved one is gone, the ghost of their disappearance is set into place”. (Darian Leader) Roland Barthes famously declared “the photograph does not necessarily say what is no longer, but only and for certain what has been”. We try to capture our loved ones through the photographic moment, but the attempt to freeze/capture/isolate time only testifies to the fact that this moment has passed, ‘this has been’.