My ongoing project, Mood, Memory, or Myth, explores moody narratives, evoking fear, anxiety, and pleasure, subjects that my family considered taboo. My prints depict dark, cinematic, isolated moments with an undertone of dream-like mystery.
I was the youngest sibling and only daughter in a household of Mexican immigrants. Many subjects were taboo: sex, sadness, family illnesses, or simply inner desires to go against the grain of what Mexican culture expected of me as a female: to wed and have children. These pressures made me anxious. The diagnosis of my father’s early on-set Alzheimers, and my family’s inability to have an open discussion about his condition, only made things worse. I turned to photography to express these inner inquietudes, impressionistically exploring events and anxieties.
Using traditional chemical darkroom processes evidences that the moments depicted truly happened. I use expired chromogenic paper to suggest that the latent images are of my own memory; my prints are small as if they came out of my family’s photo album. These are memories that could disappear completely in my near future, but continue to exist on expired chromogenic photo paper, aging and weathering.
With Mood, Memory, or Myth, I give a visual voice to those inner inquietudes, the not knowing of memory as one ages, bringing to light and having an open discussion about what memory means, exploring the taboos amongst which we live.
