Framework

D. Ross

Degree: BFA

Area: Photography

Thesis Statement

Framework presents an autobiographical archive of the loss of my paternal family through the visual language of the domestic display of vernacular photographs. Unused and overturned frames mark the gaps in my knowledge of my own family history. Through years of hastily canceled visits, eventual estrangement and later, their deaths, I have been shaped by familial rejection. There is no one left to tell me the names of the unlabeled faces; I know all that I will ever know. The camera acts as a narrative tool, offering the power to share the ebbs and flows of this evolving realization. Fleeting moments, tumultuous emotional highs and lows, and diaristic documentation are intermixed with appropriated family imagery that was reclaimed from the foreclosed home that my father and grandmother shared. Photographs still hung on the walls when my uncle and I snuck in through an unlocked window. Carefully selected dollar store frames enveloped figures from a past rendered illegible - able to be seen, but unable to be known. With great care, my grandmother had curated a convincing display of prosperity - wide, crooked smiles, first steps and tourist snapshots blanketed every wall. In reality, bankruptcy, mental illness and emotional abuse fractured relationships between my grandmother, my father, and myself. The intentional act of publicizing my own emotional archive serves to counteract the falsehoods of the perfected family photograph. The erasure of difficulty from a family narrative serves only to isolate and stigmatize the normalcy of strained relationships, financial difficulty or illness. Through insomnia, insecurity, therapy and coping mechanisms - these collages offer a glimpse into what has been a period of intense personal transformation. The most arduous moments are laid bare alongside the hopeful ones, forming the framework for a forward-facing lifetime of healing, connection and continued growth.

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1966 - 2018

1946 - 2019

1990 - 2020