Archive of Longing

Archive of Longing is a personal search for glimpses of love and belonging within an inherited family archive, "sparks of contingency" that often escape the photographer's agenda and the subject's intentions. In the process, the family photographs are re-photographed, cropped, enlarged, and printed on glass. They are then broken and reassembled to create sculptural reliefs. Using glass instead of paper as a foundation to maintain and reveal the visual content references wet plate negatives in the history of photography, where in the 19th century, they were used for "sharper", more "stable", and detailed images. Like Daguerreotypes, the content visibility shifts as the viewer moves around the image. Also, similar to a broken mirror, the reflective broken glass returns the viewer's gaze while reflecting on history and memory from a queer diasporic lens, searching for glimpses of queer intimacy and desire within a violent socio-political context. Photographs are fragments of reality, time, and place. In some ways, these pieces are fragments of fragments of fragments.

Archive of Longing is a personal search for glimpses of love and belonging within an inherited family archive, "sparks of contingency" that often escape the photographer's agenda and the subject's intentions. In the process, the family photographs are re-photographed, cropped, enlarged, and printed on glass. They are then broken and reassembled to create sculptural reliefs. Using glass instead of paper as a foundation to maintain and reveal the visual content references wet plate negatives in the history of photography, where in the 19th century, they were used for "sharper", more "stable", and detailed images. Like Daguerreotypes, the content visibility shifts as the viewer moves around the image. Also, similar to a broken mirror, the reflective broken glass returns the viewer's gaze while reflecting on history and memory from a queer diasporic lens, searching for glimpses of queer intimacy and desire within a violent socio-political context. Photographs are fragments of reality, time, and place. In some ways, these pieces are fragments of fragments of fragments.

Using Format