Series of Secrets

I have worked with black-and-white photographs found in thrift stores to create a series of fragmented images. By breaking down a group portrait into multiple, semi-obscured depictions of each individual, I aim to evoke layered possibilities for personal interpretation. This ambiguity is characteristic of amateur photography, which often exists close to memory and subjective narrative. As Roland Barthes notes in Camera Lucida, the memories attached to photographs are both fabricated and real: “Whether or not it is triggered, it is an addition: it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there.” In this project, the discarded image—once a personal artifact, now a decontextualized object—gains renewed potential. Its meaning is no longer static but open, relying on the viewer’s gaze to complete it with new stories, and perhaps, new memories.