Accidental Album

2019

ctype prints on custom wood

Accidental Album explores the significance the photographic archive plays in our private memory. Utilising the family snapshot, it is redocumentation of a series of fragmented portraits fused and imprinted on the reverse side of other photographs. Recovered and discovered from my mother’s photography collection which was damaged by water from Cyclone Larry in 2006, the residual process of uncontrolled alchemy blurs the boundaries between reality and abstraction and proposes an alternate interpretation to the term ‘accidental photograph’. The serendipitous chemistry and analogue manipulation of aged paper, chemicals, heat, humidity, mould and water and the adopted and erased imagery symbolise the way in which the archive is bound up with notions of remembering and forgetting. Although the mnemonic experience performs its function within the familial photographic context, it is accidentally interrupted, leaving traces of the past; and in the process forms a new album.