December 25, 2012 (# 7)
Medium: Photography, Nikon D3S
Date: December 25, 2012
Project/Body of Work: Souvenir Project
This photograph was taken in the field behind my grandparent’s house on Christmas Day 2012, just over a week after my uncle Paul David’s funeral.
The day unfolded as it had for many decades. The same house, the same table, the same traditions carried forward without adjustment. Breakfast was made the way it had always been—scrambled eggs and pepper bacon, prepared and served without deviation. We sat down and ate together as we always had, in the same room, under the same light, surrounded by the same objects that had quietly structured these gatherings for my entire life (indeed, they preceded me).
Even so, things were not—and were never going to be—the same. After more than six months of unexpected illness, treatments, hospitals, and all the arrangements no one ever thought they would be making, everything felt paradoxically familiar and subtly unreal. The ordinary held a heightened clarity—quiet and suspended—as though time had slowed just enough to make everything visible in extra fine detail.
It felt as if the familiar landscape had been washed and returned with a different quality of light.
This image was captured that day and placed within a larger body of work. For over a year prior, I had been photographing these spaces and gatherings without any sense that they were about to be so fundamentally altered—documenting what, at the time, felt like a stable and ongoing structure, containers holding moments of daily significance. That structure—a network of places, people, and traditions forming my family’s rhythms across not only my lifetime, but my mother’s and my uncle’s as well—was so tightly woven that it was not until his passing that I began to consider what its gradual dismantling might look like.
What this moment holds is not the expression of grief, but the first clear awareness that the structure itself was beginning to shift, that what had always been assumed to continue would, in fact, come to an end.
Process Notes:
This image was taken as part of an ongoing, unstructured documentation process that became Souvenir.
Most of the photographs from this period were taken with a Nikon D3S using the same set of lenses I carried regularly. There was no formal setup or direction, only a consistent practice of recording what was present.
In some cases, including one of the table images from this day (#1), a phone camera was used instead. The presence of a larger camera was not always appropriate in the middle of a family gathering, particularly under the circumstances. But the experience itself was my own, and felt necessary to record.
Additional Photos from this Day (plus a bonus):
The drinking glasses visible on the table (#1) are now in my possession, kept after my grandmother’s passing and the sale of their house a few years ago. So is the wig my grandfather modeled for us that day (#16), an unspoken attempt to lighten the weight my grandmother was carrying. It was her wig, purchased early in their marriage.
My grandfather passed in 2017, as did Steve (my former life partner, who passed in 2018, pictured in #13). On this day, Steve was photographed walking on Bolivar Heights after breakfast, after gifts had been opened, and after my grandfather had donned that remarkable hair.
The image from December 17 is included as part of this set. It was taken when I was less than a year old. That is my uncle holding me in my grandparent’s living room—the same house, the same curtains. In the lower right corner, my grandmother’s handwriting marks the date: “Oct. 2, 1983.”
