memory.4 #17

*This collection began by trying to use a machine to recreate a memory.* \ *I gathered old family photographs - some mine, others collected from friends, relatives, strangers. I trained a model to learn what a family looks like: the poses, the lighting, the closeness, the distance.* \ *What came out wasn’t memory.* \ *It wasn’t even family.* \ *It was something stranger.* *A series of images that felt almost familiar - like dreams passed off as truth. Children who never age. Faces that repeat. Smiles that don’t quite reach.* \ *The machine wasn’t recreating what was.* \ *It was inventing what it thinks we want to remember.* \ *In spirit, this series echoes Gerhard Richter’s blurred photo paintings - where history is softened, identities dissolve, and what remains is the emotional residue of what might have been.* *But here, the blur is digital. The memory never existed.* \ *This is the result:* \ *33 portraits of ghosts, stitched from borrowed lives.* \ *This isn’t nostalgia.* \ *It’s recognition, disfigured.* \ *It’s love, simulated.* \ *It’s memory—remembered wrong.* m0dest