WISDOM EVANESCENT
As one of only four family members in the United States, childhood comprised an abundance of my parents’ stories from their former lives in Greece. Between their sentimental recollections and brief annual phone calls to relatives during essential holidays, my insatiable imagination largely defined extended family. Although photo albums helped fill memory gaps, adolescence eventually gave way to intercontinental visits. These trips to meet elders I fondly recalled from childhood tales—a generation in advanced age I’ve missed on account of parental immigration—invariably imbued me with a desire to examine lineage and ancestral bonds.
During an interaction with my only living grandfather, I observed myself attempting to piece together traces of his life, moments I could not know. The impulse to understand facets of his narrative—his tether to life, his moorings in time—was magnified compared to viewing photographs of him back home. As we evolve, we unconsciously view portraits with emotional bias and ancestral knowledge accumulated through time. As my visits increased, I began to explore family history and interpretive memory by gathering connections to fill those voids. This process linked me with my kin, while also pushing and pulling upon notions of subjective history and cultural identity. (continued below…)
The specter of possibility they may not be sitting before me at the next visit was of course compelling. I thought about how on a single human face, a profusion of experience and wisdom, is concealed behind time and its lines of senescence. My relatives took to modest, yet dignified composure in the comfort of their homes; they acquiesced for posterity with determination, pride, and unbreakable focus. These photographs emerge as distillations of memory, while they ascertain my roots and compress years into single moments.
I recall an engrossing observation by photographer Thomas Struth: When you look at family photographs, you understand through the traces something of what was going on, of the social structure of the time. The traces of structures, social and psychological, are legible.