Skein traces it across three generations, asking what a family actually passes down — not just objects, but a photographer’s vocabulary for how a woman was meant to be seen and remembered.
Each woman in the cabinet cards that found me at a small second hand shop about a year ago was photographed at the same New York City studio — confirmed by the imprint on the cabinet card. The brooch is the one constant. So, I decided to dive into the archives and find a mourning brooch (The Met Open Access) to anchor the series.
Each panel is built from the visual grammar of the cabinet card — the formal pose, the face is clear, the body and dress receding into flatness. I preserved that hierarchy deliberately, but really wanted to play with transparencies and generations. Layered above the torn, resolved fragments is a transparent print of the original cabinet card, hovering and ghosted — because memory is never a clean transmission. What survives is partial. Then, I constructed each of them around the single piece of mourning jewelry that outlived all three women who wore it.
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