Deborah Kanfer
I work with, and manipulate found images, and negatives representing my family history. These photographs expose me to a time in my family’s existence, which lacks my own existence. Yet by working with these images in my quest to explore and formulate a clearer image of my heritage, I am allowed to enter these memories and hence, to begin to feel a sense of past and present merging and entering into my present space. In working with these photographs, originally taken by a great uncle, a professional photographer, past and present amalgamate visually while implicitly engendering a relationship that I was not aware of until I began working with these found images. I am attempting to coalesce his personal style of photography, which could be described as being traditionally detailed, with my reworking, giving them a contemporary edge. Some of my other works also attempt to explore family within these time warp contexts, but use photographs (taken by my father) of my nuclear family, prior to my existence. In this exploration of my heritage the transience of past and present merge into a more contextual frame of reference. With my work, I will continue to explore a time that is unknown to me, with the result of formulating a clearer mental image of the past. However, due to my lack of existence during that time, the formulated image will still undeniably be a formulated “memory”, or understanding of those memories, without physically experiencing them. - Deborah Beth Kanfer November 2007
