The series includes both the old photographs of my mother from the family album and my own photographs of her. They are combined with her comments on the photographs. The most “innocent” photographs, on which my mother just presents herself to the camera in the garden, in a street or in the kitchen, are re-enacted. Decades later she poses in the same way, on the same location, but in a different context, reliving the past moment.

By visually and verbally reconstructing my mother's photographs from the past I not only structure a significant part of my family history, but also explore the relation between images of my mother from her youth and her own memory of that period. The arrangement of the images disrupts any chronological narration, but follow the irrational structure of my mother's emotional responses.
Although most of the appropriated images from her youth have rather idyllic overtones, or at best neutral ones, her own accounts of them show that the memories of those circumstances are often unhappy or uncomfortable. Her interpretation of the past is often influenced by her present attitudes and emotions, or reshaped by things which happened in the meantime. Her comments are, therefore, equally ambiguous as the old family photographs.

The meaning of private snapshots remains evasive even when the memory of the experience they document is still alive. As objects of intense emotional investment they prove to be equally fallible as our own memory.