When you leave us, I’ll live in your room  

“When you leave us, I’ll live in your room” is a phrase my younger brother often said to me. He died four years ago, and I feel like I’m starting to forget him. A large part of his life was spent battling illness, and I hardly saw him for several years.

The project is constructed images that reflect my experience of loss and anxiety around the gradual erasure of memories of a loved one. I turn to the image of a bird because my brother’s family was often called “sparrows” and after his death, sparrows started flying onto my balcony, reminding me of him. The bird image in the project symbolizes loss, death, but also the constant return in memories.

Because I have missed a significant part of my brother’s life and do not know the full extent of his experience of illness, I am forced to construct my ideas about it from publicly available materials. I turn to cancer films, photographs of patients, x-rays, and tumor micrographs I found on the internet. I fill the holes in my memory and my knowledge of his experience with publicly available anonymous images.

Working with the personal archive, I engage in image transformation and reprint the photographs using the cyanotype method. Addressing and transforming the archive allows me to delve into the workings of memory and explore its relationship to photography.