Lindsay Richard

“Pictures drawn in our minds are laid in fading colors, and, unless sometimes refreshed, vanish and disappear.” 
– John Locke

John Locke theorized that personal identity was contingent on psychological continuity; we know who we are based on our conscious experience of the past. Since it’s inception, the photograph has functioned as a support system for the process of creating and maintaining not only memory but also to establish a sense of one-self. Similarly, the family album acts to explain who we are and to whom we belong.

Through the weaving of contemporary self portraits and appropriated images taken by my Grandfather and my own parents I create a ‘revised family album.’ I am questioning my own perception of the past as well as the way that our personal histories and relationships are shaped through the evolving technological aspect of photography. The paper becomes a material with which to form something new; through deconstruction and reconstruction, the emotional attachment to the subject is also distanced, obscured, less specific. Faces are reduced to pixels, time is collapsed, and the individual roles within the familial structure are unclear. The evidence of corruption reveals the document’s uncertainty.

Lindsay Richard is a Boston based artist whose work is deeply committed to the idea that to make good art, one must make work about what they know. In her case, the subject is often herself; open, raw and vulnerable. The photographic narratives both reveal the artist and expose the viewer to their own hidden neurosis.

She holds a BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design and currently resides in VT.

See more of her work online at lindsayrichard.com