Barbara Hazen
Memory Keepers
The autumn of life is often more complex in reality. It is a period of life filled with loss and awareness to the travails of growing old and the potential of mental illness. My project, Memory Keepers, examines these elements, as two of my family members are afflicted with dementia. I am not focusing on the painful loss of them, but rather on the fear of my own possible cognitive illness, and the inevitable isolation that coincides. In my empty house where there once was shrieking laughter of children and a busy life, I often experience loneliness and solitude. I am apprehensive that these feelings and my occasional forgetfulness is a foreboding of what is to come. My intention with Memory Keepers is to document something of this vulnerable time by photographing personal objects that conjure up memories of a multitude of life experiences. For this series I have used the alternative processes Cyanotype over Platinum Palladium printing to give these items the reverence they hold in my heart. Each handmade photograph mirrors the actual object and its memory. There is a limited series of 5 each.
