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When I was three years old, my father died of cancer. I was given my father's old 35mm camera as a child, with my first experiences of image-making learned through his old notes and manuals. Photography became a mechanism to understand my fear of loss and mistrust of memory. Since leaving home in 2009, I've been going back to photograph my family – specifically my younger brother, exploring his relationship to our father’s memory and his own masculinity. Stemming from an original interest in exploring my family dynamic, photographing at home became a way to understand how grief informed our identities. I started noticing the ways that my mother sees my father in us, transitioning into adulthood and becoming, in her eyes, more and more like him.

For the past decade, I've been working on this project in pieces, whenever I visit my hometown or visit my brother on base. This series became more intimate in 2020 when my partner & I moved into my mother's basement due to Covid. Soon after lockdown, my stepdad was also diagnosed with lung cancer – the same disease that killed my biological father. He had begun treatments by the time we moved in. In 2021, my brother, his wife & 3 kids moved into the family home as well, following the end of his Marine Corps enlistment. My stepdad died a month later, in September of 2021.

As I document my family, I am interested in exploring the layers of grief that we are experiencing in this most recent loss, as well as the echoes that have rippled throughout our lives from the absence of my father. The uncanny synchronicities feel almost spooky: my nieces being so close now to the ages my brother and myself were then; all of us living in the same house again and watching old family dynamics play out; my mother having to care for two lovers fighting the same illness and ultimately watching them die – my father clutching to a life with hope and a new family, and my stepdad leaving a life of pain, alcoholism, and emotional abuse.