Family Frames
2024– 2026
Family Frames explores loss, memory, and what happens when private history is surrendered to public life. I enlarge photographs from my childhood and wheat-paste them onto walls throughout San Francisco, returning repeatedly to document their transformation through weather, grime, tearing, graffiti, and human intervention.
As the portraits fade and fracture, they echo the dysfunction and disintegration of my own family. But once I place these intimate photographs on the street, I give up control over what happens to them. Without invitation or instruction, anonymous passersby draw on faces, add words and symbols, tag across the photographs, tear them, obscure them, or leave them untouched.
These interventions become acts of unscripted co-authorship. Each person alters what the next person encounters, turning the wall into an evolving visual conversation among strangers. I return again and again to photograph these temporary states, becoming both witness and editor to a work I initiated but no longer author alone.
In this way, Family Frames transforms a private family archive into a shared social document. Personal memory is overwritten by public experience, and the street itself becomes not simply a place where the work is displayed, but a place where the work is continually rewritten.
This project was selected as a 2025 Critical Mass Photolucida finalist
Additional images can be viewed at: https://www.instagram.com/memorycollective_sf
All images from this series are produced in numbered, limited editions.
