Elizabeth Hutchinson
Remains, 2025
Original photographs, archival box
11 x 7.5 x 4.5 inches
Artist Statement:
In “Remains,” I took 286 photographs from my late grandmother’s travels, reduced them to a pulp, and transformed them into new sheets of paper. The physical material of each photograph remains but is altered.
Photographs often preserve moments, snapshots of memory to aid recall. But what happens when the person who took the photographs is gone? Without insight, viewers are often left with little but their imagination to reconstruct a narrative surrounding the images. By physically obscuring them, the photographs resist access, placing the viewer outside the memory. The emphasis is now on the materiality of the photographs, rather than the story of the image. In the age of digital archiving, the tangible qualities of an original photograph are no longer present, but in this piece, one is left with only the tangible paper and ink.
The work questions what a photograph preserves, how meaning evolves, and whether reinterpretation can become its own form of remembrance.
