HOSPITAL SERIES

Over and over again I find myself trying to make sense of my own relationship with my blood family.

I feel my grandmother very deeply. I see and feel her pain, and her despair. Especially at the time I took these portraits with my analogue camera. I spent many hours with her in hospital. There, I learnt her body had been poisoning itself for many years due to a chemical imbalance. She was suffering from an illness she was too ashamed to reveal, even to those closest to her. 

I was called by my great aunt. Grandma had collapsed and had to be rushed into hospital. I found her surrounded by paramedics, being flown across the lobby of her building. I followed the swarm to the street, jumped in my car and drove to the same hospital that had seen my birth and my grandpa’s death.

They gave her a quiet, private bedroom where her sister would sleep for two weeks in a row, hardly ever leaving her side. They’d grown up together in a time of war, famine and extreme violence. Who knows what they went through.

While my grandmother was in hospital I didn’t attend university. I refused to miss out on one single moment with her. Even, especially, if it was her last one. 

One morning I brought my Fed3 camera and took some portraits of her that I later processed in the dark room and made into a photo book titled Searching for the Missing Piece. This was 2014. Still to this day I’m trying to make sense of it. 

My grandmother is still alive and, despite slowly decaying, in good health at the age of 88. We are now estranged. I am now purposefully giving up on all of those moments I was so terrified of missing out on.

My grandmother thinks a lot. She doesn’t read or write. She cannot. But she sits down and thinks. I tried to capture some of those moments. She doesn’t talk about feelings, she doesn’t tell what she’s ruminating. She rarely opens up. So all I can do is observe her go down that tunnel of thoughts. She comes out of the trance with a nervous laugh and a tilt of her head.