Untitled (family pictures) by Alice Hargrave

Untitled (family pictures) explores the intersection of the ephemeral and domestic experience. This can be a momentary play of light within an intimate interior space, personal landscapes traversed or touched by human intervention, residual objects, or ever-changing undulating skies that can calmly shelter or hauntingly weigh heavy upon us.

I am interested in subjectively defining “family” in pictures and imaging domestic space, or experience without literally depicting home and family per se, but rather the feelings and experiences associated with family. I want to thread together extracts, transitory details of respite, moments and experiences that the camera seeks to stop but instead underlines the impossibility of photography to stop time.

The cusp between lightness and darkness fascinates me.

That in between time, which is neither day nor night, underscores for me the passage of time. Moments of darkness just before nightfall when deep shadows are somewhat illuminated but are steadily being usurped by the dark. This movement mirrors the corners of the mind filled with faint memories. Dusk is ever so fleeting, analogous to the sense of loss we are constantly facing as we feel life racing by. There is a certain beauty in this richness of color, this patina or shroud, that also seems to speak of that inevitable loss, the loss of a moment, a single day, a childhood, a person, or an entire lifetime. An immediate “capture” is attempted and then there is the subsequent, inevitable loss characteristic to photography, making it the perfect tool for probing the fugitive nature of childhood, youth, memory, and landscape.

Photography is the art of the fleeting, an attempt to catch hold of happiness. However futile that attempt may be, we still try to grab hold of time, but time is fickle.

Alice Hargrave lives and works in Chicago, IL.
To view more of Alice's work, please visit her website.

You can purchase the photograph "Untitled (family pictures) ; blue skies # 10, 2013" from Fraction Editions.