the specifics might be vague
As a child, I remember spending time at the Farm. My great-grandparents, and later just my great-grandmother, kept a small family farm in Iowa where I would ride my bike down the dirt roads, pick apples, “drive” the tractor, go fishing, and explore the fields with my siblings. A few of those memories aren’t actually mine, but stories my father told me of his childhood at the Farm, yet each holds a visual in my mind. Each time we access a memory, we rewrite the moment. The very act of remembering alters the facts. This process, called reconsolidation, makes the image a bit more blurry and malleable, a retelling of the last time we shared the memory. the specifics might be vague explores the role images play in truth and distortion within our memory.
Truth and authenticity have always been entangled with photography. The photographer both conceals and reveals, curating the images of our lives. Family albums hold defining moments of our lives, like birthdays, graduations, and weddings. Images spark memories and stories, overwriting the truth we may seek. With the increasing ease in the use of artificial intelligence and digital manipulation, images help create your desired, synthetic memory. Using analog photographs from my family archive, I re-record them as digital files and pixelate each image by hand, blurring some areas while others remain visible, shaping the image into a new narrative. This process mirrors the reconsolidation process, altering the image and memory each time. Some become more abstract than others, with moments I can no longer grasp in my head, while others don’t belong to me at all; but the time spent with these images gives them new life.
the specifics might be vague began as a way to better understand my great grandma Gueldie’s life. After she passed at one hundred and two years old, we lost thousands of stories but gained over a lifetime of images. From enduring the Great Depression, to losing her first husband during World War II, to raising three kids in rural Iowa, and later losing her second husband to a battle with cancer, her stories were always authentic. We live in a world where we can easily remove a blemish from a selfie, erase people from a background, or even generate an image from a description. When we question the authenticity of every image we see, how do we define truth? What is acceptable and what distorts our past? Where do we draw these boundaries? Memory is flexible and always changing; the only constant is the stories we tell ourselves.
Awarded LensCulture Critics’ Choice Top Ten 2025, McNeese Works on Paper Purchase Award, Honorable Mention in Staring at the Cloud: Collage Between Analog and Digital at the Los Angeles Center for Photography.
