In front of the photograph of my mother as a child, I tell myself: she is going to die: I shudder, like Winnicott’s psychotic patient, over a catastrophe, which has already occurred. Whether or not the subject is already dead, every photograph is this catastrophe.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

In 2002 I bought a large selection of family album photographs in Berlin. For a long time I wondered how to work with these images on a personal project, without altering the essence of them or intervening too much.

Carefully observing them, I realised that the main characters, a German couple, often photographed one another identically positioned within the same setting, producing a series of “double-take” photographs.

The intention of simultaneity of these unknown characters allowed me to create a series of five lenticulars. Making possible their original plan of being together in a frame, the lenticulars transform two photographs into a single moving one. The image above is only an approximation of how they look in real life for the purpose of illustrating the movement.

In a reconstruction of a past, one of which there are no known witnesses, forgotten moments gain a reprieve within the memory and minds of the present. My idea is to destroy the photographic essence of fixed imagery by giving birth to a hybrid that reconstructs a gone by moment. Each of my compositions is static yet simultaneously in flux, acting not only as proof of the past, but as an alternative interpretation of it.

Can photography fill the emptiness of death? Is a photograph enough to remember someone’s existence? Are objects and photographs enough to bring us back the certainty that there was a past?

Perhaps in the longevity of objects and images we find the same painful truth: the inanimate cannot die. After we are gone, we will be remembered through small things, pieces of who we were will be kept by others in an attempt to hold on to the past.