Commission: Irina Werning research

After looking at the work of Jane Waggoner Deschner I started looking through old photos from my childhood as well as my mother’s childhood. I discovered many of the items of clothing my mum kept as keepsakes were featured in the photographs. I was very enthused when I then came across the photographer Irina Werning with her on-going series ‘Takes Us Back to the Future’.

She takes old photographs and the people in them & re-enacts the scene often very impressively precisely; thinking carefully about costume, props, location, lighting and posture. They are very compelling in the way she reflects the quality & narrative- nature of each image individually creating surreal time-travelling scenarios. 

This whole series explores the inevitable effect of time, how people change, yet in this one moment it’s almost as if nothing has, just like how people change but their belongings eg. clothes stay the same, not wasting away but possibly going to waste over time. It comments on our societies cultural obsession with nostalgia & possession and a need for connection to our memories and family past.

 

Although most of these snapshots that are recreated are quite mundane, the whole concept surrounding the project made me consider photographs at weddings, birthdays, christenings and other possible important moments in someone’s life; yet we still need a physical connection to these memories. 

Like I found in my questionnaire, people seem to keep ‘one-use’ items, which then becomes wasteful even though they already have photographs depicting the event such as a wedding. It almost contradicts the use of photography as a way of keeping memories; I feel I have a personal connection to this idea as I first became interested in photography as a form of recording and documenting events due to my bad memory often finding myself flicking through old photo albums. 

 

Despite this I like to be able to touch old clothing especially from before I was born as a sort of psychic connection into the past. I really want to start focussing more on special clothing that I can find in photographs, by having the photo and clothing simultaneous to one another you can almost imagine the event- the emotions, weather conditions, sound etc. occurring such as at a wedding.