I grew up looking at my parent’s family albums, imagining their lives before me. Trying to reconstruct the memories I didn’t have, I imagined them over and over in my mind. Somehow I always felt that the people I saw in these photographs differed from the ones I saw next to me every day. The ambivalence of the medium, its possibilities and its limitations suggest we should mistrust photography as a record of our lives and histories.
My work addresses the idea of “looking back” as a framing device and a narrative mode. For the last two years, I have documented people from the village called Pilcene in the Eastern side part of Latvia. In search for the last traces of my family here, I looked for the people who used to know my grandmother. Through their stories I became aware of their attachment to the land and the houses they live in.