She’s Not Here (2021)

In December 2016, my mom got ankle surgery

I stayed with her for three weeks while she recovered. We made a project out of it. I never knew what to do with the pictures. But she was getting older, and I was just glad I made them.

My mom died suddenly in December, 2020. It wasn’t COVID. Initially, the coroner ruled “inconclusive.”

She was just done.

The next month I went to her house with the same camera, same lens, stood in the same places, and shot the same pictures.

But without her in them.

Part I

Part II

A few months later, we sold her house. I’d sorted, packed, sold, given away, trashed, burned, and donated every last thing she owned.

All that was left was a building she’d lived in. Walls, counters, windows, stairs. And still somehow, it teemed. Almost suffocatingly full of absence, of spent possibilities, of light.