Anne Walker Photography

For as long as I can remember, I have held on to family photographs and artifacts as tightly as I can for fear of losing the past. From an early age, I sensed how easily the memories and stories connected to these items could vanish with their storytellers. When I was 23 I lost my mother to cancer and a sense of finality and impermanence overtook me. The security of home and family stability disappeared. The person who shared the most precious family stories with me was gone. And now, as the years pass and there is no longer an older generation to verify facts, the stories are becoming murkier. I feel an urgency to give renewed energy to this history.

This series began with a rediscovered photograph of my maternal grandparent’s house. This was where I spent holidays and summers as a kid, exploring an attic filled with antique objects and photographs that opened a door to another time and place. There was magic in that house, something existed there that didn’t in my day to day world. My imagination was sparked.

Immersing myself in the visceral world of memory enables me to follow a bridge to the past to create this work. There I explore obscured family stories and fading recollections, creating photographs that meditate on the fragility of memory and discover touchstones to the past.

Using my daughters in these images, wearing the clothes or holding objects that belonged to grandparents and great grandparents, the stories change and grow. There is no longer the finality I once saw in them but a continued thread.

work in progress

In 2018 our oldest daughter was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. As she went through chemotherapy I witnessed her confront her diagnosis and treatment with bravery, beauty, fear and unbelievable strength.

As the mother of two teenage daughters I witness the space between us expand and contract constantly. I see their need for me diminish and then at times intensify, it is never static. These photographs juxtapose intimacy and distance, love and heartbreak, as I come to terms with them growing up into independent young women and flying away.

Saudade, a Portuguese word defined as a deep emotional state of melancholic longing for a person or thing that is absent
When I first discovered the word Saudade, I was struck by how much it resonated with me, it encapsulated a feeling I have had for decades. My parents passed away relatively early in my life. There was no longer a physical home to return to and my family’s history felt less defined without elders to tell it. I felt the acute absence of home and family. This series is about looking for home or the place that one longs for that no longer exists. What does home hold for us and what do we do when it is gone? The search is one that may be unattainable but in the quest there are clues, fragments, and traces to be pieced together and read like a treasure map.