Adoption Ghosts
"What is it to live through a moment and, reflexively,
our relationship with the desire to understand that moment?" E. Edwards
In Journey of the Adopted Self, Lifton (1994) spoke about the adoption ghosts, “that haunt the dark crevices unconscious and trail each member of the adoption triangle [ed: i.e. the adoptive parents, the birth parents and the adopted children] wherever they go." In parallel to the real world, there is “an underground world of fantasies and fears that they can share with no one.”
This project grew out of the density of my own experiences of life after adopting two young children.
Marking our first year together as a family, it is about the time of transition and change between the arrival of the children in our home and the legal adoption.
Adoption ghosts project is about the times in between.
It is about the short moments of silence that fall through the cracks of the family routines, the pauses in between the children’s playtimes, bathing, eating, sleeping and other activities.
What happens during these gaps when we all stop acting out the family life?
What thoughts and emotions do these moments evoke?
This project is about trying to understand and articulate these moments.
A photograph is a moment of presence, a moment in someone's life.
Photographing these transitional moments is seeking for ‘presence’ of the feelings, thoughts, and things that make us who we are.
The ordinary domestic scenes captured in Adopted Ghosts become a record of "the shifting marks of people on space and the shaping of people by space" (Edwards).