This is something special that is a bit of a family heirloom…and it is something my mom gave to me when I moved to Chicago. …This is a portrait of my maternal great grandmother, and my paternal great grandparents, and it’s something that I had up in my apartment.

…[my great grandmother] died of polio when [my grandmother] was a child. This is the only photograph that my grandmother still had of her.

The fact that it’s made its way to my possession is important and what I think is interesting about it is the way photographs inhabit your imagination. I imagine my grandmother looking at this photograph, it being the only one she had of her mother, [then later] giving it to my mom, then me eventually having it. It has sort of a mythology to it. And just looking at the photograph itself, sometimes I would be afraid to open this because it has this book-like quality [and I thought that] her spirit might just pop out of it, so for a while I just kept it closed, but then decided to display it, and her spirit didn’t pop out as far as I know.

This belongs in the Museum of Submerged Lineage

Exhibited by Nicki

Transcript edited by Susan Golland