This project combines photographs of Italian and American pasts, in which characters are swapped and origins merged. By creating shared memories between my own childhood and that of an Italian family I’ve found myself within, two origins are combined in memory as they now are in life. Using photographs physically given to me by this family, as well as my own childhood snapshots, I insert myself into their past and them into mine.

 

The works remain true to the initial photos and their original qualities through digital collage. To highlight natural union within the diverse scenes, images were chosen that were already, somehow, united. Various parts of the photographs remain blurred or pixelated, allowing the subjects who belong to become ambiguous with their outsider counterparts in a constructed space that need not be completely in sync. The process aimed to create photographs not yet completely solidified or convincing, but nonetheless, decidedly and forcefully intertwined. 

 

While powerfully linked in each other’s lives, it often feels as if our pasts should do the same; the relationships have become too strong, perhaps, to remain only in the present. These photographs explore this realm of memory before either family knew the other existed, depicting diverse cultures and pasts in parallel timeframes. Each belongs perfectly in these moments that never were, but now, most certainly would have been.