Dark Chamber

As I prepared for the birth of my first child, I found myself returning to a question that photography has carried since its invention: can an image preserve what time inevitably takes away?

My grandfather escaped Poland alone, the sole survivor of a world that had ceased to exist. He never spoke about his family. No photographs survived the war. No stories were passed down. Growing up, it seemed as if they had never existed at all.

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The project emerged from an attempt to construct a genealogy from fragments. Not to recover a lost history, but to use photography where memory alone could no longer reach.

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The result is an alternative family album made of dysfunctional cameras that consistently fail to preserve light. My grandfather exists only as projection, his face briefly settling onto a death mask cast from my own before withdrawing. My father and I each appear inside a camera obscura box that produces an image while refusing to record it. My son appears as a printed ultrasound — the only fixed image, registering a body not yet available to any lens. Four generations in one space, assembled from absence.

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I thought I was making work about photography. Looking back, I think I was trying to understand what remains when continuity is broken.