
What is 'home' made of? Is it a collection of people? objects? memories? Is it an evolving being? Does it have a life independent of its constituents? When one recalls one's childhood at 'home', does one recall being in a space or just a memory of that space? And do the relics of memory ever depict that being or even that space truly? Does the camera ever lie?
Always.
When I flip through images of my home in albums, I see depictions which do not do any justice to my memories. I see moments and faces and events. Carefully selected, arranged and preserved for posterity. To remind one, in the future, that this is what the past looked like. This is what we were. This is how we lived, ate, celebrated. This is how our home was, and this is how it should be preserved and remembered. But, is that enough?

I wonder. Do people make photographs and albums to force upon their memories a singular depiction of the times? Or is that the nature of the medium itself? That it doesn't allow for the depiction of the truth (rather, the whole truth) in the first place?
Whenever I'm home, I sift through family albums. Initially, it used to be the excitement of looking at old photographs. Gradually, it became an exercise of searching for that (at least) one depiction which matched with my memory of 'home'. But hardly did anything come close, and it is from this gap that my motivations started taking shape.

Destroy the pretence of the albums. Create your own memory relics. Re-imagine them, re-construct them, re-take them or re-make them. What did and does 'home' stand for? Has your experience of that space been ever accounted for? Nostalgia or even the act of remembrance cannot always be a collective exercise.
Through this exercise (which is on-going and evolving), I seek to replace the physical album with a collection of my own. A collection which attempts at staying true to memory, however, still using the camera. But, not only the camera.

This exercise is in continuation of "The Future of the Past", but taking a step back. It is an attempt at de-constructing images that already exist and making new ones. In this essay, I offer some images from albums of the past and some images made in the more recent past. What is what, is for the viewer to decode.

Confusing, isn't it?

Imagine my brain.

I'll leave you with the images now.

But, can you be left alone with these images?

Do you see what I see?

No? That's okay. It always has been.

Of course, it doesn't end here. Keep visiting.
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