MY MOTHER’S DAUGHTER // A found cache of my mother’s color slides, thirty years after her death

Joanne Virgina Shuris was born to Greek parents, and lived in the California Inland Empire where the orange groves meet the desert. She was a caring and empathetic elementary school teacher, and an avid amateur photographer.

She battled breast cancer for years throughout the 1980’s, a time when it was a death sentence. She died in 1985 when I was six-years-old. I don’t remember much about my mother.

Her photographs, negatives, slides, 8 mm films and cameras were purged and destroyed after her death. A mysterious cache of 12 color slide reels appeared in a storage unit when I was 35 years old, her age when she died. This is a small sample of that imagery, before she was sick and my family fell into darkness. Preserved, fractions of a second, from a loving and astute observer.