I took many years to understand that my relationship with photography began in my childhood and was basically because of this woman, my mother. Despite not having technical or aesthetic knowledge of photography, she loved capturing every moment of my childhood and my brother's. Every trip, every birthday. And there was always some film left in the analog camera, which we used on ordinary everyday photos, right there, in the routine of our home.
Without knowing it, that became the first spark that I would later develop in my relationship with photography. I also didn’t know how to take pictures properly, barely knew how to handle a camera, but I remember loving to capture every moment I could. Not appearing in them, but already behind the lens. She was the one who taught me to preserve memory, she was the one who showed me its importance, even though I never told her that and she probably has no idea.
She was the one from whom I inherited a photo album with old pictures from her side of the family, portraits of a lineage so distant that I no longer know how many generations are in that album. Even though she also didn’t know who the people in those photos were, my mother was chosen as the guardian of this family album. And today, that role belongs to me.
Most of the people in those portraits are no longer in this world and I don’t even know their names or have any idea who they were. But these people and this album inspired me to create a photography series called Passage, which is essentially about how we go through this life and, some time later, people don’t even know who we were, don’t remember our names. Not everyone will be marked in history and most of us will be forgotten. The idea of this project is to express, through my recreations of these images, that we are only passing through. So I started using some of the photos from this album to give them new meaning in a way that aligns with my body of photographic work, and today I share with you some images from this album that I can now say bear my signature, especially those of my mother.
These photos are my entry for today's #Monomad challenge and I hope you like them.
