Sorry I haven’t got better pictures of this project…I’ve tried unsuccessfully to sneak into my parents’ office to scan the photos without my mom noticing (I’m going to give this project as a Christmas gift).
Although I’ve spent lots of time on my other projects for various reasons–the film didn’t catch onto the spool for the black/black, white/white project and I ended up taking a roll of nothing, which I didn’t realize until I was ready to develop, for example–this project really absorbed me, but for a different reason.
The courses I took this semester worked together symbiotically, and I find that a lot of the things I learned in those courses influenced this persona project. In French Cinema class, for example, we studied Freud’s idea of the screen memory, in which he argues that some childhood memories are merely fabrications of the mind, a defense mechanism of a sort in order to explain some emotion in the present with “history” from the past. Not to mention the fact that the beautifully filmed movies we saw influenced the way I understood how to frame and stage scenes in photography. On top of that, I was exploring a lot of my own personal history in my poetry workshop, and I found myself being drawn to understanding my family, and my mother in particular.
Even though writing is the art form that comes most naturally to me, I love the immediacy of photography, and I was excited to take on the persona of my mother–to be specific, my mother’s memories–in this project.
Where to begin on the strange process of creating this representation of memory? Perhaps I should start with the 8AM photoshoot at the Arb, catching strange and curious glances from joggers and dog-walkers as I ran back and forth from the timer-set camera to posing in my mother’s traditional Korean han-bok costume. Then, there was the exciting trials with liquid light, coating lightbulbs with polyurthane spray until it ran down my arms, only to read afterwords that “This contains chemicals known to the state of California to cause cancer.” Oh well. Liquid light was an amazing experience, and it felt a lot like alchemy. In the dimmed dark room, with only slivers of red light shining through, I watched the ghostly face of my grandfather appear on the lightbulb as I swished it through the developer. To be honest, his staring face scared me, and I couldn’t wait to get out of the darkroom.
Thank you so much, Pipo, for trusting me to use the liquid light (I only used a little, and put the bottle back on the shelf). I will never forget the experience, and I doubt I’ll get another chance like it again. In addition to learning how to print and develop photographs, I can now say that I know how to turn ordinary objects into projections of memory–and if art isn’t magic, I don’t know what is.
