Heather Kelly - final project

For this series, I chose to photograph at my dad's house where I grew up. The entire place evokes a lot of nostalgia for me, especially the backyard where I photographed. I wanted to capture some melancholy and sort of a sense that the location where these were taken is in disuse and decrepit. Going home isn't always a positive experience and despite being in a place full of so many fond memories, it can also feel entrapping and dead and no longer like a welcoming home. I wanted this to come across in my photographs and I wanted each of them to bring to mind memories from youth by containing elements that allow each separate image to potentially be part of a larger narrative.

I included different organic imagery in many of my photos, like fruit and a piece of a wasp’s nest, as symbols of how temporary life is and in the case of both the wasp nest and the location in general, how temporary some homes are. One image is of the playhouse I spent a lot of time in as a child, and since I grew older and moved away it had been left untouched for years. The images with bodies in them I used a slow shutter to show movement in order to create an uncanny feeling, as they were shot in the afternoon on a sunny day. I felt like juxtaposing a dark figure with an outdoor daytime environment made the photographs unsettling, and by excluding the face I further obscured the subject and removed its identity.  For the most part with this project I wanted to reminisce about the past and create a reminder of the temporary nature of not only life, but of places and objects that were once familiar and felt like home, but no longer do.