On a recent visit to my father's house, I rediscovered a box of old photos belonging to my late mother. Born and raised in Latvia she left her homeland as a young woman towards the end of the war and joined the flood of refugees fleeing the Soviet army, first heading to Germany, then on to a Displaced Persons Camp in Belgium, finally settling in Britain after the war. These small passport sized photographs of female friends are inscribed on the back with dedications, names and dates in Latvian and German. They were obviously given to my mother as a friendship memento and I imagine she would have reciprocated in kind. The inherent poignancy of these miniature portraits is heightened by the knowledge that their paths never crossed again and by now all are most likely dead.  In this series of photographs I have enlarged the original small images to make salt prints, using the traditional method of reproducing a photographic image developed by Henry Fox Talbot in 1839. Each print is unique and handcrafted, showing the brushmarks and imperfections characteristic of the technique. The pocket sized snapshots have been transformed and can now be appreciated as physical artefacts with each girl’s wistful gaze softly embedded within the actual fibres of the paper. I hope by making this series to have honoured the original intention of the gift of the photograph – to immortalise and remember a friendship. You can see the original images and inscriptions on the rear on the relevant blog post here

Salt prints on 310gsm Arches Platine fine art paper.

2018