I have so many pieces lying on the floor or on the little shelf in the basement all covered in blue and purple. I have made them after a session with a group of the 'real' photographs - the actual paper objects with all their little tears and marks.

Like this one.

Its always the same - whether in plaster (here) or chalk or paint. Blues and golds and a tied up uncontrolled form. It seems that I can never get to the bottom of the thing, to the story in the picture I have looked at. So lost and so often terrifying. The time after the photograph is taken ends in a black and white image of the gates of Auchwitz.

So making this is all about recovery. The tangle is all there but the lush beauty - the deep textiles, the mystery of touch; I have tried to capture these.

And the new box of images has meant I am revisiting all these pieces and looking at them afresh.

So the box of (cousin) photos is sitting on the table next to my paints and bits and pieces. They are still cradled in the two plastic fruit trays I tipped them into on arrival. Although I know these photographs are simply pieces of paper covered in a special film, the object (photograph) seems to bring on a sense of 'other time' in my mind...I have been thinking about this over and over with past projects....How the absence of the people in them is made more poignant by the presence of the image sandwiched in the paper. As though the paper itself has captured something of their aura?

Whatever it is it feels quite monumental - at times comforting and at other times slightly threatening...

I will go back to reading Barthes, Berger and Sontag

It feels so important to think about touch and how the camera captures those fleeting moments of connection. 

The pandemic has meant that the post has been 3 or 4 weeks late. I had forgotten  about the email my second cousin had sent me a few weeks earlier. She had asked me if I'd like her to send a selection of photos she had found which she didn't want. They included a few of my own family and some others she had no knowledge of: 'friends of the family' who were unknown. I had thought a week or so before they landed that maybe they had got lost in a corner of a Royal Mail sorting office. As they were (I thought) doubles of ones we already have in our precious family collection I wasn't unduly concerned... 
Nothing prepared me for the avalanche of mixed emotion and creativity that erupted with the arrival of over 50 extraordinary images.....