Vacant Since 4 October 2006 (2007)
“Photography is the inventory of mortality. A touch of the finger now suffices to invest a moment with posthumous irony. Photographs show people being so irrefutably there and at a specific age in their lives; group together people and things which a moment later have already disbanded, changed, continued along the course of their independent destinies.”
– Susan Sontag, On Photography 1977
The impetus for this project grew from my continual efforts to document spaces that I have occupied. I am less interested in the documenting of the actual physical bodies in a space and more so with the impact created after the presence has left.
Vacant Since 4 October 2006 is a continuation of this working model; previously my work was concerned with more recent and immediate contact between a person and a space, this series deals with the implications of a total loss, an end of contact. The house photographed in this series belonged to my grandmother; a space I began documenting four months after she passed away. Since her death, the contents of the house have been thoroughly stripped away in some spots and left undisturbed in others. These photographs investigate the interior domestic space Marie once inhabited, the same spaces in which I once directly interacted with her.