Rosie Martin

Rosie Martin - Identity - Too Close to Home 

A combination of possessions ,people ,family , memory and identity . Rosie Martin both a photographer and photo-therapist has had a career focusing on the family photo album and memory's . As well as her own personal work which i have included below she runs phototheropy classes based around the family photo album dealing with involuntary memory's and deeper existing meanings behind particular photographs. I am taking inspiration from Rosie Martins series too close to home because of the mundane element in the series .  she focuses on the everyday side to memory not just special and extraordinary occasions . 

"Looking back over all the work I have done, over the last fifteen years, it is the relationship between photography and memory that has preoccupied me. “Make the most of your memories” extols the text on the folder in which the bulk processors, Fotorama, return my prints and negatives. But as I begin to examine my collection of personal photographs in light of Fotorama’s slogan, I am immediately struck by how photography and memory relate in a poignant and perverse way, through a sense of loss, predicated upon the unconscious wish to somehow arrest the passage of time by holding it in fragments of a second. How much are the images from the past that I visualize in my mind’s eye constructed and mediated through the few photographs that have survived in my family album? How else might I aim to re-connect with my memories? Can I speak to a collective memory through photographs that express my location in history and culture? "

Too close to home - Mum’s hand Rosy Martin

Too close to home (hairnet) Rosy Martin

Too close to home (shadowy mum) Rosy Martin

Too close to home
(mantlepiece) Rosy Martin

Too close to home 

I am making this work because I must. I am compelled to do it. No, wait. This is no lazy ‘artist as hero’ position, this is not work as an expression of myself, not a closed circle that I am refusing to unpick. It does however have a lot to do with the psychic processes that photography necessarily inhabits. The ‘absent presence’ of which Barthes spoke. I photograph in order to hold onto the moment, the place, the trace which I cannot stop, cannot keep, cannot hold. I know this, and yet however partial, incomplete and vain the attempt, I return and photograph again. Its a pre-bereavement project,  born out of my responses to the death of my father and the desperate searching that goes with that first recognition of profound loss. It is a melancholic project, the view-finder misted with soft tears and an ache that no image can assuage. Yet filled too with contradictions, remorse tinged with a longing to escape .Because I chose to make this a public project, it must speak beyond the particular. Yet I do risk starting from this personal punctum, to evoke an emotional response in the viewer who will not share the precise details of the story.

Too close to home is an inquiry into the texture of place and memory through the notions of absent presence. The work includes metaphors for the process of ageing. As my starting points I drew upon family myths and a detailed exploration of memories of a specific place. I am using photography and video to explore and isolate tiny details and fragments, so the audience only builds up a sense of the space over time. By pushing at the edge of legibility I enable the audience to project their own meanings upon the images, which symbolise and stand in for the continuity and discontinuity of change over time.