home movie
living room
shed house
home movies
The home movies are five animations created digitally from five photographs. These snaps belong to my family photograph collection. In 1996 my mother died from multiple brain tumours, secondaries to breast cancer. Losing a parent is one of the turning points in life when everything changes (becoming a parent would be another) from then on your whole perspective seems to alter. My sister described one feeling as “shuffling up to the precipice”. We have a box of family photographs stretching over 60 years, it contains pictures of grandparents and relatives that I don’t remember or didn’t know. It was a box we were continually adding to. After my mother’s death, how I felt about the photograph box changed. There had always been something open ended about the box and suddenly it contained the last photograph ever taken of my mother and possibly the first as well. She belonged to the first generation in my family for whom it became commonplace for photographs to be taken throughout her life. Me and my sister will be the next. Photographs don’t record the whole story, it is not usual to record the bad times. Like any family we had our difficulties and although my mother was for some time suicidal all her photographs show her happy, smiling, and contented. It seems to me that when you look at a photograph you bring a lot of your own needs and memories to the reading of that photograph and that over the years, as your life moves on, these change. The result is a sort of chinese whispers effect. The image evolves with you. Roland Barthes wrote “In this glum desert, suddenly a specific photograph reaches me, and I animate it. So that is how I must name the attraction that makes it exist: an animation. The photograph itself is in no way animated (I do not believe in lifelike photographs), but it animates me: this is what creates every adventure”.
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