FAMILY PASSAGE

All families have their origin story. My maternal family arrived at Ellis Island from Ukraine in the early 1900s, one step ahead of the czar, fleeing the pogroms of the early twentieth century. Settling in Connecticut, thousands of miles from their small village, my great-grandparents and their children spoke no English, and began their life here facing many of the same prejudices and struggles that today's immigrants confront, over one hundred years later. 

But what is the truth of a family’s history? I know almost nothing about their life before they arrived here after their long journey in steerage.

In this body of work, Family Passage, I have chosen to explore the story  of my mother’s maternal family through the lens of five generations of women, from my great-grandmother, Jenny, who arrived here in 1905, through my daughter Sara, born in 1990.

In blending these images, I mix photos across decades – vintage studio images, vernacular snapshots from the thirties through the nineties, and more recent digital captures. I have layered some of my own landscape and botanical images from Connecticut, where the family settled after arriving in America; many of these married with the settings where the original photos were made. In creating these images, I have chosen to disregard time and place, instead imagining events and conversations that might have occurred, in the landscape of my Connecticut.

Personal and family memories are told and retold, becoming a collective family history which may or may not be “true”. But this history becomes the truth as we know it. And in the oft-quoted words of Emily Dickinson, “Tell all the truth but tell it slant.”