Snapshots: repair

“…stray black and white images, which come out of long forgotten boxes, often have a secret appeal and demand that one addresses the lost lives centred in them…” - W.G. Sebald

Illustration-led research of repair where I positioned repair as an authorial act, with breakage and mending capable of holding story as the historical documentation of destruction or disruption.

This project centred on a small, carefully compiled photo-album made by a girl between January 1922 and September 1923. The ‘Snapshots’ album, originally from Hinkley in Leicestershire, was found in a charity shop in the South West. This suggests a broken link from the family it documents. The break, a temporal rip in memory, is a charged gap I intended to metaphorically ‘fix’. Narratives and ascribed meaning were inserted into this gap, myself acting as a curator-creator, archiving information to direct, and misdirect, the viewer.