Private Property

From June 2008 to April 2012 I documented my mother, father, sister, and five-year-old niece, who all reside in a one-bedroom apartment in Baltimore Maryland. I had become numb to my family’s lifestyle, accustomed to their downward spiral of addiction, poverty, unemployment, imprisonment, and depression. I longed to see their humanity.

The camera allowed me the safety of distance to look into the eyes of each family member and have a moment, a connection. I finally felt and saw the power of subjectivity. Ultimately, I understood a mother’s strength, a father’s regret, a sister’s beauty, and a little girl’s fearlessness. All together it added up to a family’s will to survive.

This work was never about poverty or substance abuse. Through their portraits, I was able to witness their complexity and internal struggles. I witnessed moments of compassion and vulnerability, which are in a constant state of motion and always shifting with their self-destruction and disassociation. But the idea of family and my family specifically, is permanent.

The unconscious lets time pass by
The conscious borrows time with shifty eyes and callused hands
Making a certain choice between the will to remember
And the relief in forgetting