Project 3
Composite Memory:
Collective Identities
11-3-2023
identity
belonging
heritage
When looking at my own family photos, I realized that while I might know the names of my ancestors, that’s about it. Who they are and who they are to me are different things.
Here, I explore identity as a composite.
Though we can preserve likeness through photography, memories shift and warp. bell hooks wrote on this “living memory shaping and informing the present,” describing the “longing to tell one’s story” as a “gesture of longing to recover the past in such a way that one experiences both a sense of reunion and a sense of release.”1
There’s a reunion here of faces that never met in life. There’s a sense of release here as their identites blur and morph into each other, much in the way their bodies did to create mine.
“
ancestral bodies
buried in sand
sun treasured flowers
press in a memory book
they pass through loss
and come to this still tenderness
swept clean by scarce winds
surfacing in the watery passage
beyond death
”
- bell hooks, In the Manner of the Egyptians
All photos are from personal family collections.
1 bell hooks, “writing autobiography”