My first relationship
There is a dark stain on the wall just above my mother’s head. She is sitting on a plaid couch with one of her legs resting on the other. They are not crossed at the knee like how most women cross their legs, but with one ankle resting on the opposite knee. There is a long scar that runs along the length of her left shin bone from when she was in an automobile accident a few years before. Her thick, jet black hair reaches just past her shoulders and she is wearing a pastel, striped shirt. You can get a sense of her exhaustion just by looking at her eyes and the dark bags underneath them. I am lying across her lap while she feeds me with a bottle.
This description is of an old family photograph that my father took of my mother and me in 1989. For My First Relationship, I rephotographed this same image, twice, using a tiltshift lens. One photograph is of my mother in focus and the other is of me in focus. The final product is a crossfade between these two images; an endless loop of shifting focus from mother to daughter.
