About This Project

Lynne Breitfeller

My project, After the Fire: Water Damaged, explores photographs as memory, examining the shape-shifting potential of images that have been damaged or lost. After a fire above my studio, water damage impacted my negatives, chromes, and prints—nearly a third of my archive. Much was discarded, but I retained a collection of negatives and chromes.  

During the pandemic, I rediscovered these artifacts and considered the damage that had changed them, morphing them into new images shaped by happenstance. Water on emulsion transformed their compositions that created new meaning.

By sorting through the damaged pieces I was able to come to terms with the loss of my photographic legacy and now see the images anew and transformed. The memory of what was had shifted into something different.  

As with memory itself, does our experience of remembering the past change each time we revisit it? When we think again of it, does it take on new meaning? After the Fire: Water Damaged, made me consider ideas of transience and new incarnations, as I am well aware of the impermanence of possessions, and of memory

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