In More Water Under the Bridge (2014-present),  I examine the rubble of my family’s construction company,  an industry giant in the 1900s, which went defunct in 2003. From my perspective, growing up with traditional values in North Carolina, examining these buildings and my family home can be interpreted in one way as a contemporary version of culture wars. My interests in gender, power, and infrastructure inform my practice, combining photographs with archival sources related to my family’s legacy in construction. 

When my father passed away in 2014, his final piece of advice was to “let more water run under the bridge.” My father was a civil engineer, working between New York and North Carolina for over thirty years. Cryptic as it was, this has stuck with me as I have moved through the waves of grief and onward in my life, finding meaning. Like a detective looking for clues, I have found the symbols in my life to place meaning on the advice through my work: making photographs and digging in the archive.

I seek mystical solutions to unanswered questions about my life and family, a history just out of reach and searching for clues, following the light towards symbols (circles, flowers, chairs, hands), and connecting the dots. My questions become more complicated as I reach the center and realize there may never be an answer to death and decay. In a way, these questions link together like stars in a constellation. You can’t see the whole sky at once. In Eduardo Cadava’s Words of Light, Cadava aligns Walter Benjamin’s oeuvre with the history of photography, writing, “Photography is a mode of bereavement. It speaks to us of mortification. Even though it remains to be thought, the essential relation between death and language flashes up before us in the photographic image.” Cadava continues, “The history of photography can be said to begin with an interpretation of the stars.”  

When asked about the meaning of life, my father would reply, “Memories,” and lament that “everyone should have a memory bank” or a way to hold on to the fleeting moments. And thus, I have found meaning and peace with the understanding that I am the “memory bank” to keep the memories. I am the steady bridge that the water flows under, just as the photos flow when the camera shutter clicks open and closed; as the hours keep passing, sunrise to sunset.