Back to index of Nerve 24 - Summer 2014

Photographing Dementia 'Time and Space'

By Rachael Radford

This project was very much based on capturing portraits of my Grandmother, for whom I was a carer, as she suffered with dementia.The photographs were to help me deal with losing her at a rapid rate, and to preserve a little of her before the dementia got worse again.

Once my grandmother had moved into care, much to my sadness, I started taking photographs of her home, the home she had started a family in and the home I had grown up in with a Sunday roast and a musical in front of an old gas fire.

I photographed the house exactly as she had left it and concentrated on the spaces she had once filled: her side of the couch, the bed in her living room...

I also photographed the spaces that she hadn't used for years as they were upstairs: her marital bedroom, her wardrobe...I was shooting on my 35mm for this project and once I had shot the last frame, I decided to open the back of my camera very slightly and allow some of the light that poured through the old netted curtains to bleach the film. I wanted the film to be almost like a time capsule, a record of the space at that exact time.

Once I had the film developed and hung them up to view, I realised that the film had malfunctioned at some point during shooting and that I had ended up with a series of 'accidental diptychs'. This was not my intention but I find that it works better than if I'd have planned it myself. The images are now not only concerned with the space left empty by my Grandmother's absence, they are also concerned with the spacial confines of a single negative to tell a story.

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