Say your family isn’t very good about keeping photo albums—why not create your own? Rafael Goldchain’s new book, I Am My Family features the artist transforming himself into his ancestors to understand them better. As his press materials state, “Photographer Rafael Goldchain’s Polish-Jewish ancestors emigrated to South America in the 1930s, and many others perished in Poland during the Nazi regime. Also lost in the turmoil of war and emigration were most of the portraits of his extended family. When Goldchain became a parent himself, he decided to make up for this lack of evidence and recreate the lost gene-rations of the past, in the present.” I chose to photograph myself as a means to be directly autobiographical. I started creating characters drawn from my memory of various stages of my life. One of those characters was based on my maternal grandfather. The photograph I made of myself as him had emotional intensity and conceptual challenge, and it determined the direction of my work since then. Parallel to this I had begun documenting my life as well as researching the lives of my ancestors. (http://www.themorningnews.org/gallery/i-am-my-family) I Am My Family is an autobiographical exhibition that features digitally altered self-portrait photographs. It suggests that grounding an identity within a familial and cultural history that has been subject to erasure, geographic displacement, and cultural dislocation involves a process of gathering and connecting scattered fragments of past familial history while at the same time acknowledging the impossibility of complete retrieval. The self-portraits in I Am My Family are detailed reenactments of ancestral figures that can be thought of as acts of “naming” linked to mourning and remembrance. I Am My Family proposes a language of mourning through self-portraiture and through the conventions of family portrait photography. In reenacting ancestors through a... (http://lenscratch.com/2012/09/rafael-goldchain/) undefined

More on Google