Gregg has many terrific series and I am featuring Remembered: The Alzheimer's Project where he has used projected childhood images juxtaposed with portraits of the victims of this insidious disease.
Remembered: The Alzheimer's Project: For people with Alzheimer's, the past becomes the present. Distant memories shift from background to foreground. To illustrate the past's prominence, I've included it in each picture--in the form of a projected slide image.
Prior to the shoot, I looked through photographs from the subject's family albums and chose an image or two of them as a child, teenager, or young adult. During the shoot, I'd project slides of these images: the older person shares the frame with their younger self. The younger self is layered over the present, occupying an equal part of the moment.
The most wrenching part of witnessing the dissolution of a loved one is that you have them whole in the same moment that they're gone. That simultaneity of have and losing, that nostalgia, is at the heart of Remembered.
We have a tendency to look at an older person and forget who they once were. Often, we have a hard time picturing old people as ever being young. I want you to look at these pictures and be reminded that the people here loved, married, were vibrant, passionate: they lived life fully.
It's hard for many of us to live in the present. We're constantly re-evaluating what we've done or projecting ahead. Rarely are we in the moment the way some with Alzheimer's are.
2 comments:
Deeply moving images. Gregg has managed to show the truth of these people's lives by blending past with present. My father lived with Alzheimers for nine years before his death in 1987. For his 70th birthday I made a watercolor painting based on a photo of him at age 7. That's how I always saw him even when he was silently curled in a fetal position on his bed in his final years. Daddy was always that little boy standing proudly on the dining room chair dressed in his sailor suit and hat. Gregg has captured that in his photos. Marvelous.
i am so glad that you posted this extraordinary work. looking at it again was like seeing it the first time. wonderful.
Post a Comment