Finders Keepers

Once commonplace in every home, the photo album was used to commemorate and storage family history, covering every aspect of life from birth to death. The pages tell stories that hold a little bit of each of us within them. Finders Keepers is a series of collages made with vernacular photographs from exposed, undeveloped rolls of film which I found at antique markets and purchased online from eBay. Through collage, I re-stage family events and alternate memories for a family photo album of which the pages are filled with pictures you would not normally see and/or include: the mistakes, the imperfections, the unusual. The moment I take ownership of the found negatives, their meaning undergoes a change. Though flooded with prescribed and imprinted information, I attempt to look at them as a clean canvas. As the collector, I become the artist and curator, using the photographs themselves as a medium. Each montage is made up from many individual details, extracted from many different found photographs. During this process of merging, the images begin to present photographic accounts of places, people and things that would have otherwise never been put in relation to one another. Original descriptions and explanations are lost and so narratives are rewritten.