my grand-mother and me

 

I always wondered who she was because I knew too much of how she looked like. I look like her: my grandmother who died at my age 34. Though, our physical resemblance is as similar as our destinies are so unlike. This studio photo of her doesn’t give a hint about her life. She was the wife of a farmer, helping in the fields, never left her country and had already 5 children when she prematurely died. Half a century later her grand-daughter is a single women without child, leaving abroad, working in an office, speaking few languages. I wanted her next to me because I was hoping her inheritance not being only physical. I wanted her next to me without dust, without the plastic film of the old family album page and here is she, displayed on the web, the countryside women who has never travelled.

At the end is not only about my grand-mother and me, it is about nostalgia, identity, heritage, appearance, globalization, digital technology, evolution… or regression ?