In December 2016, my mom got ankle surgery. I went to Rhode Island for three weeks while she recovered, and we made a project out of it.
I was a baby photographer and had big plans for the pictures, but that wasn’t what they wanted to be. They were just a record of us, of how we were together.
My mom died suddenly in December, 2020. Initially, the coroner ruled it “inconclusive.” After a lifetime of surgeries, genuine trauma, and self-reclamation, she was just done.
The next month I went to her house with the same camera and same lenses, crouched in the same places, and recreated all of the photographs.
But without her in them.
Time Frame
2016–2021
Camera
Canon 5D Mk IV
Lenses
Sigma 24–35 f/2, Sigma 35mm f/1.4, Sigma 50mm f/1.4, Canon 135mm f/2
Location
Cranston, RI
Software
Illustrator, Lightroom, Photoshop
The first goodbye
The last goodbye
A few months later, we sold her house. I’d already packed, sold, recycled, re-homed, trashed, burned, and donated everything she owned. All that was left was a building she’d lived in.
And still, somehow, it overflowed.
We hammer wood for a house,
but it is the inner space
that makes it livable.
We work with being,
but non-being is what we use.
—Lao Tzu