FAMILY PORTRAIT SUITE

The Family Portrait Suite was created as a "memento mori" of recent losses in my family; that of my middle brother, John, an AIDS doctor who tragically and suddenly passed away in the prime of his life on September 1, 1995, and my beloved mother, Ruth, whose own death followed approximately seven months later from cancer. My father, Richard, died over seventeen years ago, his death was also unexpected.

This photographic artwork not only stands as a symbol, like tombstones all in a row, to mortality, but represents the larger, weighted metaphor of a particular family's own collective death. For without parents, one is orphaned; without the life-force of the mother, lt is hard to imagine family life; and without one's sibling, shared childhood memories and its family history are prematurely severed and forever eclipsed.

With an acute awareness of the existential dilemma found in life, the conundrum of time and the randomness of death (and photography's own relationship to time and death), I set out to make an artwork that would express my own profound grief, to contain within it the visceral and visual equivalent of mourning, and to document the presence of that which remains absent, a state often associated with bereavement.

At first, this seven panel piece was to be photographed by the large-format Polaroid 20 X 24 camera as positives; the first two black (for my parents), the second two white (for my older brother and myself), then black (for John), followed by the last two in white (for my younger brother and sister). While working, I realized the backs of the one-of-a-kind positives (its so called "negatives") looked very much alike, whether it was white or black. Knowing intellectually and metaphysically that the life/death cycle are one in the same, much like the Polaroid positiveJnegative process, but experiencing this psychic realization for the very first time, I decided to underscore the complexities found in the twin activities of living and dying by hanging the Polaroid "negatives" in situ. Like life, these 'negatives" contain the memory of its opposite, and like individual family members, they look similar but are different. These "negatives" parallel life in that they can never be used for reproduction, offering us instead the illusion of permanence in its own sublime silence, reminding us that the only constant in life is change. The richness of the matte surface of these prints echo the fullness oi life while the black hole patina represents the deep, endless void felt by its loss. The Family Portrait Suite not only stands as a unique testimonial to my own family, but shares the universal experiences felt by all families and their respective losses.