This project takes as its point of departure an incident in which my grandmother burned family photographs, deliberately destroying the family’s visual records. Through this event, the work examines the relationships across three generations: my grandmother, my mother, and myself. As a documentary photo and video project, it replaces the absence of a physical archive with oral histories, recorded phone conversations, and ongoing dialogue with my mother, tracing the tension between intentional erasure and the persistence of familial relationships, particularly between a daughter-in-law and her mother-in-law.
Mediated through conversations with my mother, the project reconstructs my grandmother, who existed as an incomprehensible figure throughout my upbringing, through fragmented memories and narrated recollections. By substituting destroyed visual material with auditory narratives, the work approaches photography through its absence. Although the images have been reduced to ash, the project visualizes this gap, translating the emotional residues left by loss and the threads of relational continuity into the language of a documentary photo essay.