The last few years have found me caring for my mother and aunt, both ‘living with dementia,’ as their mother did before them. My mother, like my late father, was a photographer. The old family album is a wonderful archive, but, aptly enough, it has fallen to pieces over the decades. There are blank pages, dried up pieces of tape, prints jumbled and identities forgotten. Other pictures resurfaced after years in the attic, and began to take turns on the mantelpiece like an ever-changing museum of our lives.
It was a tale I wanted to share. I asked myself the question: how do you tell a story about dementia when family members are in the thick of it?
One approach is to attempt a linear narrative. To pin things down before they are forgotten, create a prompt to family storytelling; to impose order on chaos, a chronology when time gets out of joint. To re-tell old stories, cement family legend. To anticipate the losses to come and set out a version of the story that you think your future self will want to hear.
Another approach is to enter the world of forgetting itself. Have beginnings, middles and endings, but as Jean-Luc Godard said, not necessarily in that order. Shuffle time like a pack of cards, with blanks and gaps and repetition. Explore darkness with metaphor, unmoor yourself from reality. Express as best you can the unravelling of identity that begins as the autobiographical memory falters.
Kaleidoscope blends these two approaches. I use rephotographed archival imagery and new documentary work, punctuating these with the woodland images I make to process my feelings about the present and future. These images serve as a metaphor for memory and forgetting, tangled root and branch structures expressing ideas about the twin legacies of dementia and photography in my family, and what it all means for me.