I Am My Ancestors
I Am My Ancestors, The Old Country and In America, is a two-part photo project that explores personal heritage, identity and immigration to the United States.
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Having never met my paternal grandparents, this work mixes fiction with reality in an attempt to portray my ancestors’ lives. Using documentary style photography and self-portraiture, I role-play an imagined life in my ancestral homeland, Romania, and that of my grandmother as a recent immigrant to America. On one side, my character is a visitor to a traditional lifestyle in Europe, and on the other, she is my grandmother dropped into my current, American Southwest, lifestyle. Both find themselves as awkward outsiders trying to fit in. Yet, as the character in these photos, I become a part of my relatives’ lives and they become a part of mine.
This work presents an opportunity to connect with ancestors that I never knew, to understand myself in relation to a culture that, although mine, I never experienced, and to question the forces that make us who we are.
The Old Country
In America
Hand-made book
I Am My Ancestors:
In America
After she immigrated to the U.S. from Romania, my grandmother found many challenges to her new life there. Within three years, she was a widow with two children to raise.
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She didn't speak much English, so finding employment was difficult. She worked in the cotton mills and cleaned railroad cars. She depended on her young son, my father, to supplement the family income by selling apples door to door and searching for scrap metal on the tracks. Forging for food in the neighborhood provided much needed nutrition.
She never learned to drive, or rode in a car, but she made many friends throughout the community, and found pleasure in cooking, spending Sunday afternoons at a friend's house, or having picnics under a tree.
Ship's Manifest
Dad and Bunica's Portrait on desk
Dad's Diary "I remember mother..."
New Home
American Laundry
Raking the Xeroscape Yard
Drying Food
Pecan Haarvest
Gathering Grapefruit
Mother's Cookbook
Meager Meals
Discovering Nopales
Dusting the Metro
Work Bucket
End of Shift
Yard Work
Language Study
Beginner's English
Neighbors
Covering Graffiti
Picnic Under the Palo Verde Tree
Needle Wielders
Walking the Rail
Apples for Sale
On the Footbridge
Vogue at the Metro
Hanging Bag
Under the American Flag
Christmas Gifts
Waiting
Pregnant Teen
A Wedding & a Funeral
Reminiscence
I Am My Ancestors:
The Old Country
The fall that Andrei was four and Vasile had his first exhibit, I traveled to Romania to make pictures and explore my family heritage. It was October, green, gold and orange, just after the harvest.
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The pumpkins had been gathered, wood piled for the winter, and the bounty of apples and pears transformed into glasses of fiery țuica. My hosts, Ileana and Petru, welcomed me to their home and invited me to experience their village life. I immersed myself into the culture and into the photographs themselves. Chores needed attending each day, as did children and animals. I followed in the footsteps of a grandmother I never knew, living the lifestyle of rural, northern Romania.
Passage
Walking Into the Picture
Adjusting a Haystack
Tending the Beanfields
Yellow Door
Morning in the Beautiful Room
Sweeping by the Orange Wall
Milking
Horse's Home
Andrei Outside
Splitting Wood with Toy Axe
Cooking Squash
Exploring the Barn
Birth of a Cow
Laundry Service
Red Dot
Hanging the Hand-Made Rugs
Drying His Clothes
Raking the Apple Orchard
Fall Harvest
Wearing the Gathering Basket
Dying Wool
Prize Turkeys
Walnut Harvest
Roxy in Her Finest
Muddy Footpath
An Offering
Walking Home from the Fields
Talking with Matusha
Rising Dough
Red Pot
Weeding Unfamiliar Graves
New Fruit
Heading Home