Familiar Objects [2012-2014]
Familiar Objects were created from found photographic material – some 2,000 colour slides belonging to an unknown family from Novi Sad, Serbia. Thoroughly common, these photographs may appear to be the ideal family album. Holidays, celebrations, snapshot posing, conventional representation, and the serious business of recording family history – all the stereotypes of family photography are here. These images are but a fragment of an immeasurable conglomerate of photographs discarded for incomprehensible reasons. Such photographic waste is where the private meets – and transforms into – the public: Family memory into goods, and stereotypes into excess.
The new context given to these photographs introduces fresh elements into an otherwise well-known game. Through a simple process of manipulation, transparencies are projected onto colour photo paper using a traditional enlarger – the resulting images thus becoming negatives, of a sort. This ‘negative’ quality may be viewed as a metaphor for the radical change in the understanding of private history brought about by recent technological advances in photography. It acts as a censoring filter that allows strangers to catch merely a glimpse of the family puzzle made up of unfamiliar faces and events. In these hyper-saturated negatives, the everyday ritual of taking family snapshots is transformed into a potentially terrifying signifier for some past or future disaster. [MV]
::