In the archive I was drawn to the work of Nan Taggart. An amateur cinematographer working from the 1940’s onwards, who documented her family’s life after they moved from Aberdeen to a farm on Deeside, near where I grew up myself. When looking at archives we gravitate towards places we know or have ties to. I believe this is due to our mutual nostalgia for what the places we know, and love looked like before we passed through them.
Documentary is a uniquely human condition and our constant need to record our lives has evolved over time. What was once a novelty has become ingrained into our daily routine.
I looked at some old family photos to try and capture how we distort our memories and ideas of who people were. All the photos I worked with were taken long before I was born. I know the people in them but somehow, I feel detached from them. As they are depicted as people I hadn’t met yet, that at the time didn’t know I would exist.
Photographs create something tangible from the past. However, our own imagination can abstract them and make these images anything we want them to be.