In this new exhibition, “Scenes from a Life, Ch. 3,” I share personal images of my father’s decline and final moments exclusively on Snapchat once a day for the month of November, 2015.
Each day an image will be posted that can be viewed for only twenty-four hours before it disappears. On their smartphones, each viewer holds the photographs in their hand.
Exploring memory and impermanence, these photographs are a vivid portrait of human relations and trace the photographer’s (mine) personal experience of death, loss, and grieving.
In our current life, death is universal but rarely seen. Or when we do, it is “somewhere else”: dramatic, war-torn, from a distant land. The intent here is to capture lyrical private moments that are normally hidden.
In the self-portraits where the photographer and the subject–me and my dad–are together, events are captured unfolding in real-time. Often I don’t look through the camera’s viewfinder, and the image is framed and captured using remotely to be unobtrusive.
The project borrows from both documentary and narrative photographic approaches and the work is informed by cinema (R.W. Fassbinder, Michelangelo Antonioni) and Nineteenth-century American painting (Hudson River School, John Singer Sargent), as well as the Swedish television show, “Scenes from a Marriage,” by Ingmar Bergman, made in the 1970s.
The project started about four years ago but most images are from Fall, 2014. My father died November 24, 2014.
To see the exhibition, viewers sign in to the Snapchat app (or download it) on their phone, then add the artist “SteveGiovinco” as a Friend. The process is easy and takes minutes; instructions are posted on the artist’s website.
Afterward in 2016, images will be posted on my website.