Changeling

‘Changeling'.(wisselkind)

What if you were a Changeling? What if your perception of the past is completely different from the stories you were told by your family? How can it be that people who live together for decennia have completely different memories from one and the same moment? My sense of being a Changeling is something that many people experience. Since I found out that memories are playing tricks on us, I decided to create a fictional life, to make my own memories. In my project ‘Changeling’ I capture these memories by playing with the concepts of time, space and scale within an imaginary life. The title ‘Changeling’ orientates the lecture of the images, which convey a sense of nostalgia and sadness, as well as disorientation.

Photos influence and distort actual recollections of the past. There is always an element of wishful thinking in the choice of the photos that are made and kept; a way to construct your life story and present yourself in a certain light.

I found that family albums and snapshots are not merely objects. By going over the photos again and again the story keeps changing. It makes me realize that your perception of the image must be incomplete, if not incoherent. Although it’s sad that I will never know the whole truth, it’s also a revelation to realize that memories aren’t fixed realities. It makes me free to get lost in my photographic archive as much as I want to and at the same time embrace the confusing relation that photography has with reality. My ‘Changeling’ series is about selective memory, it’s a story with holes. Zooming in and out of a family scene, while giving suggestion a bigger role.

The photographic concepts used in this series have been realized through analogue photography, polaroids and the use of different handcrafted blurring- and extricating techniques.