Story:
These images are a part of my series A Veneration of Time, paying homage to my lineage and the idea of home, acknowledging the physical places and the emotional landscapes shaped by migration, memory, and connection. My mother passed away in December 2023, leaving me with hundreds of photos and negatives capturing her life in Jamaica during the 1980s and ‘90s and later in New York during the 2000s. The archiving process has become personal and communal, allowing me to explore the relationship between photography and storytelling. The act of physically stitching these images together with metallic paint plays with their temporality, expanding upon the untold stories within a personal historical narrative.

The images in the collage are drawn from my mother’s archive, snapshots of her life in Kingston, Jamaica, and my childhood in New York. “Love you, my twin” references a card my mom once wrote to her sister but never had the chance to send, marked with an “N” and an “A” around a heart for Natasha and Aliesha. I often weave together archival photographs and personal artifacts in my practice, exploring the intersection of memory and migration to reflect on how familial identity takes shape across different places and periods.

The focus of my work has shifted as these portraits of my mother have begun to transform into self-portraits, blurring the boundaries between her experiences and my own. Through these alternative processes, I can reinterpret my mother’s images, amplifying the visuals of someone devoted to holding memory. In engaging with these photos in ways that she never had the chance to, I honor her life, one that held so much potential and continues to live through these images.

Submitted by: Jhanique Lovejoy

Connect: @jhaniquelovejoy