“Erosion” is a photographic series reflecting on how places, people, family and memories change only to fade away before our eyes. This project took on a life of its own while attending my grandmother’s 100th birthday when a short trip to a dusty mining town presented me with the disappearing act of life.
The plan was to take a road-trip on an old route my father used to travel in his youth as a truck driver for my merchant grandfather. At an early point we stopped at a river crossing where he had been stranded for 3 days eating only cinnamon cookies. That happened in 1962 and it became a fun family anecdote.
After a minute of wandering around the crossing, I noticed a pair of crosses on the edge of the road. A young couple had died there in 2004. The loving eulogy messages written on their crosses had a great impact on me. It dawned on me how territory changes in meaning: what had been a fun story about my father's youth, was now a memorial. A place of deep grief and loss for others.
I watched my 80 year old dad reading those eulogies and for the first time the idea that one day he'll be gone felt real in an almost tangible way. With that revelation lingering in my mind, we kept going. It made me reflect on the concepts of legacy, transcendence and if they even matter at all. Not like characters making it into the annals of history, but in a more immediate way: father to son. It made me realize what a small step in time a generation is. I thought of how my deceased grandparents had only been mentioned a few times over the last decade.
While being an exercise of thoughts on life, death and impermanence, this series is also an uncertain cry that screams "I'm here!", in the hopes that maybe down the line when -if- someone ever stumbles on to it, an echo will say "This man was here."
