Family Frames
2024– 2026
“Family Frames” is a personal exploration of loss, fragmentation, and the passage of time. The project examines how identity is projected, revised, and experienced in public space.
I enlarge my own childhood family photographs to roughly two feet in the longest dimension and wheat-paste them onto flat surfaces throughout public spaces in San Francisco, returning repeatedly to document their transformation as weather, grime, tags, tears, and public interventions alter the images. As the portraits fade and fracture without my adding content, they echo the dysfunction and disintegration that shaped my own family experience. At the same time, these private archives enter civic discourse.
The original photographs were discovered in cardboard boxes after my mother’s death. I selected representative images, scanned them, and printed them on thin architectural paper chosen to accelerate weathering. Over a period of about two years, as I install and revisit the works, returning almost daily to photograph their metamorphosis, passersby often stop to share their own family stories, drawn into an evolving exchange between memory, place, and public life.
Community interventions function as co-authorship and editorship. Collective memory layers itself onto personal history until the images no longer belong solely to my family but become shared. Blending constructed and documentary strategies, the work invites dialogue about visibility, consent, the passage of time, and the erosion of connection. These are not restorations but records of change, asking what survives and who ultimately authors the image- a personal elegy and a social document made with community collaboration.
This project was 2025 was selected as a Critical Mass Photolucida Top 200 finalist
All images from this series are produced in numbered, limited editions. Additional images can be viewed at: https://www.instagram.com/memorycollective_sf
