Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope

1857.PERSONAL.CARPENTER

Other

The last few years found me caring for my mother and aunt, both with dementia, like their mother before them. My mother (like my father) was a photographer. The old family album is a wonderful archive, but aptly enough, it’s fallen to bits over the years. There are blank pages, dried up bits of tape, prints jumbled and identities forgotten. Other pictures have resurfaced after years in the attic, and are now taking turns on the mantelpiece like an ever-changing museum of our lives.

I tried to put the prints in order, to tell a version of my mother’s story before it is forgotten. I’ve coupled these with observational and portrait images that I have been making for the last few years in the house and garden shared by my mother and aunt until their recent deaths.

I punctuate the narrative with dark, metaphorical images about forgetting. Some of these are the empty pages of the album with their half-century old sticky tape marks. Some are woodland images that I make to process my feelings about the present and the future; tangled branch and root structures expressing ideas about the twin legacies of dementia and photography in my family and what it all means for me.

I didn’t want this project to incite pity or to have a trajectory defined by loss alone. I wanted it to be celebratory too. I wanted to show the love and joy and creativity that, despite everything, still remained.

Kate Carpenter

Self-published

2023

Hand-sewn photobook in slipcase, with text insert, fold-out, and extra print.

30 x 19 x 2

48

41

200

Oxford

Stanley James Press

www.katecarpenter.com

www.katecarpenter.com/kaleidoscope

www.katecarpenter.com/shop

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