Series - FotoSlovo 2026 - Category « Conceptual photography »

What happens to us when memories vanish beyond recall? Who do we become when the image of ourselves begins to blur?

When my mother was diagnosed with dementia, I found myself asking questions that had no answers. I began to wonder how memory truly works, and how much of our identity can be salvaged when recollections fracture and fall apart. Photography became my way of coming to terms with the illness—a means of taming it, and a tool for forging a new language through which both my mother and I could speak about it.

It was important to me that my mother not remain merely the subject of the photographs, but that she become an active participant and co-creator of the project. For this reason, I invited her to work with photographs from our family albums. With her own hands, she examined the images, wrote notes, crossed things out, marked people and places. Some of the photographic prints we deliberately subjected to destruction using traditional techniques: we cut them up, erased them, rubbed them away. In doing so, we symbolically traced the way the illness strips my mother of her memories.

My photographs focused on small fragments of reality. I searched for moments of “displacement”—minor lapses and errors that I once associated with absent-mindedness, but now recognize as signs of the inexorable progression of the disease.

I tried to portray my mother. To preserve her—both in the photograph and in memory. This is how intimate, close-up frames came into being, meticulously capturing every texture and contour of her maternal body.

This project is a record of our shared experience, but also an attempt to confront a universal fear: the fear of losing memory, and with it, one’s sense of self.