en route

The prints in the series, en route, present twin narratives of migration. Some years ago a distant relative sent me a number of digital images from the early decades of the last century. They were photographs of my great-grandparents, grandparents, great-aunts and uncles. All Italian born, they had moved from the poverty of rural Lazio in the Comino Valley towns of Sora and Atina, to start a new life in Birmingham. I already had the family stories to fit the faces but what struck me immediately was the autonomous life of the faded images. They had been on a parallel journey, one generation to next, from film to paper to digital files, finally arriving in my email inbox. It set me thinking about images and fading memories, family histories and contemporary migration; and to quote Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. Continuing their migratory journey, the en route prints are a further two generations from those that appeared on my computer screen. Each image has been recomposed in photoshop and taken to slide film before being copied to instant colour film and subsequently image-transfered to a watercolour paper. Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism (London, Verso, 1983)