MY MOTHER’S DAUGHTER

2015
Book + found audio

My mother, Joanne Virginia Edwards, was an educator and an amateur photographer. She always had, so I’ve been told, a 35 mm camera strapped around her neck, constantly documenting our family’s Southern California existence together.

In 1985, when she was 33, she died of breast cancer.  We buried her when I was six-years old.  Few of her photographs survived the purging and chaos of the years following her death.

In 2012, when I was 33, my father found thousands of lost color slides secretly buried in the backyard shed. “I can’t bear to look at those pictures,” he told me. I travelled to his tiny town in the Arizona desert to discover what had been long-lost.

These images offer a first-person portal into a world I have no recollection of, they detail fractions of a seconds, moments of my early life captured with the astute eye of a loving and vigilant observer.