Coping with the Limitations of Time

This story begins in 2009 on an old winding road in Massachusetts, a road my grandfather travelled thousands of times in the forty years he and my grandmother owned that house on old Quarry Hill. He pulled to the side of the road unable to remember where he was going. What began was a photographic exploration into my grandfather’s dementia diagnosis, focusing on what he was losing as his memory slowly degraded (Part I: The Art of Losing).

In the years that followed leading up to my grandfather’s death, I turned the camera toward my remaining family, examining what they were losing during his slow and inevitable decline in their preparation for a life without him. The work developed into a wider depiction of middle-America, specifically in a small New England town negotiating the aftermath of the post-industrial economy, a mounting opioid crisis, and how those losses altered the social and political landscape (Part II: Coping with the Limitations of Time).

My grandfather’s passing segued into the final and ongoing exploration of this work, using the camera to explore my own loss as I ventured into the world in search of myself, returning ephemerally each time with a more acute understanding that my concept of home had changed forever (Part III: Homesick Blues). The following photographic essays traverse, in three parts, the ways we cope with loss, both physical and emotional, in community, with our families, and as individuals.