American Cheese
I can only offer you a slice of what I understand to be American.
I’ve wandered so far passed,
I’m present only for the past.
So much so
Home has become a memory,
of a memory,
of a memory. But…
This cheese don't melt.
I grew up with many photo albums filled with our lives from before I was born to this very day and for much of my life I took these photos for granted until one day my parents told me four to five albums were damaged by a flood in their apartment.
I was devastated because many of those photos were blueprints to my identity and now they were destroyed.
This made me think heavily about the choices I made when I took photos. I also contemplated my use of social media and digital libraries. What made a photograph special to me? To keep? To share? To print?
In the Summer 2017 I decided to reclaim certain photographs from Instagram in order to re-examine my obsession with recording my life. It was a timely process of reclaiming my American representation through distortion in order to demonstrate their commonality and complexity.
Poem by Elan Cadiz