JU/IE DECUYPER
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where the wild things were, 2018
/personal photo archives, a family album
where the wild things were is a photobook with a selection of photographs and hand-written notes I found lying around in an old shoebox at my grandparents’ house. When my grandmother passed away of Alzheimer’s disease in 2018, I wanted to translate memoryloss into a book using their faded pictures, blurred photographs, damaged photos and some images, shredded or torn in between. A lot of questions came up when I went through the photographs and it reminded me of how photography preserved the past, the what was. For someone with memoryloss this doesn’t feel like it’s their life, neither does it belong to their present. The fading mind cannot relate anymore to the what is. Both worlds got disconnected, it must feel so scary and lonely.
/“Sometimes me and my grandmother would spend an evening together looking at old photographs and then she would tell me stories about the people in the frames. As if they would come alive again. Who is the pigeon-man? Is this but an old acquantaince or an aunt or uncle I’m looking at? Was my grandmother happy when she was captured smiling in the fields? Who took the photograph?”/
