How Russell Hart Preserved Family Memories in As I Found It: My Mother’s House
Welcome to this edition of [book spotlight]. Today, we uncover the layers of 'As I Found It: My Mother’s House,' by Russell Hart (published by Kehrer Verlag). We'd love to read your comments below about these insights and ideas behind the artist's work.
Preserving memories is the only way to keep them alive, especially when time and illness begin to erase the stories we once thought were permanent.
As we age, and especially as illnesses like dementia take hold, the stories, moments, and identities tied to our loved ones can fade. This interview explores how photographer Russell Hart turned the emotional task of clearing his mother’s home into a project of preservation and discovery. With his book As I Found It: My Mother’s House, Hart offers not only a poignant reflection on family and memory but also a guide for anyone navigating similar challenges. His unique combination of artistry and personal insight ensures you’ll walk away with inspiration for preserving your own family’s history.
In the quiet rooms of his mother’s house, Hart found echoes of her life.
Each object he uncovered seemed to carry a piece of her story—boxes of saved letters, old trinkets meticulously arranged, and furniture worn by decades of use. These items, once overlooked, became a bridge to understanding her identity in the face of her fading memory.
This is for anyone seeking meaning in moments of loss and transition.
As I Found It: My Mother’s House
As I Found It: My Mother’s House (Kehrer Verlag, Amazon) is a deeply personal and visually stunning exploration of memory, identity, and family history by renowned American photographer Russell Hart. Set against the backdrop of his mother’s lifelong home, the book chronicles Hart’s poignant journey of sorting through decades of possessions after his mother’s battle with dementia forced her to leave. Through 58 meticulously crafted duotone photographs, Hart captures the essence of a life lived—the intimate details of a hoarder’s meticulously curated collections, the wear and tear of a home lived in for over forty years, and the haunting echoes of a family’s history.
This visually rich narrative blends documentary-style photography with a profound emotional resonance, offering a meditation on loss, memory, and the fragility of identity. Designed by Ernesto Aparicio and published by Kehrer Verlag, the book combines striking visuals with Hart’s reflective text, inviting readers to find connections to their own experiences of family, aging, and the passage of time.
Overview of the project: What inspired you to create As I Found It, and how did the process of documenting your mother’s house help you explore themes of memory and identity?
As I emptied my mother’s house of its decades and even generations of accumulated possessions, I watched her personality ebb away. I realized, though, that the material things she had left behind were not only instantiations of memory but also representations of her identity. To some extent I think that photographing these items was a way of capturing and holding on to the person she had been, but more generally it was an effort to preserve family history. And from an artistic perspective, it was a way of making something positive of an emotionally difficult experience.
Artistic vision and approach: Your photographs focus on the intimate details of your mother’s home and possessions. How did you decide what to include in this visual narrative to reflect her life and struggles with dementia?
Initially I photographed the home’s interiors as I was clearing them out, with a kind of architectural rigor. I think I chose that approach at first because those spaces were so familiar to me, and seeing them increasingly empty told the tale of what was happening to my mother and what I was having to do with the house. It captured some of the sadness I was feeling. The interiors also showed the patterns of wear and tear caused by decades of living, something that my technique (HDRI, more on that later) tended to enhance, even down to showing fingerprints on surfaces. (My parents never really “improved” the house because they weren’t at all materialistic.)
But I soon found myself focusing on the contents of the hundreds and hundreds of boxes that were stored in the house. The architectural images worked as “establishing shots,” but the boxes told a more intimate story. My mother kept everything— she was a hoarder, but unlike many hoarders brought a system to her collection— so I had much to choose from. As I opened all the boxes, I was naturally inclined to photograph the ones that contained familiar things, though I was also intrigued by those with contents that were completely new to me. But my choices were also aesthetic: I gravitated toward the boxes in which the contents had been grouped and arranged in interesting, meaningful, and even mysterious ways. Sometimes I paired smaller boxes and/or objects that seemed to bear some relationship, visual or semiotic, to one another.
The other thing that helped determine which images I featured in the project was simply the need to edit the work down when I started to think both about the book and about exhibitions of the prints. There are many more photographs from the project than ultimately made it into the book.
On face value, the images are as much about the pathos of objects as they are about the loss of memory. I think the book’s overall context, including its texts, is what places the focus on dementia per se.
Storytelling in photography: The objects in your images carry deep emotional resonance. How do you use composition and context to convey the layers of personal and family history they represent?
Originally I didn’t think of the project as a form of photographic storytelling, to be honest. I’ve always believed in the power of photography as a storytelling medium, but my own work has tended more toward discrete, stand-alone images. And I think the exhibition prints I’ve made of the images from the book, which are larger-than-life and highly detailed, do work on their own terms as single interiors and still lifes. In fact the prints offer viewers a quite different experience than the book.
But as I got deeper into the project and realized that it could benefit by being a book, the more I thought of it as narrative in character. I think the book’s introduction, texts, and captions advance that narrative aspect, and in the shows I’ve had of the work I’ve supplemented the prints with printouts of the text from the book for viewers, and also left viewing copies of the book out for them to look through. Of course the way the images are sequenced in the book helps develop the narrative as well, though it’s not a traditional narrative with a beginning and end and an arc in between, but rather a series of open-ended stories.
My idea was to let the boxes’ contents advance the narrative, so I treated them as still lifes, but with as much clarity and tone as possible. As still lifes they aren’t “composed” in a strict sense, though. I wanted them to be somewhat transparent in approach yet rigorously presented.
In the still life tradition, whether in painting or photography, symbolic meanings are often assigned to specific kinds of things. I think of Dutch painting in the late 16th/early 17th century, for example— which although it represented beauty and abundance with its flowers and fruits, often included suggestions of decay and the passage of time, the flowers wilted and the fruit rotting, a condition reinforced by painting insects all over them. I like to think that the still lifes in As I Found It do the same thing in their own way, capturing the disuse and wear of their contents in order to tell the story of a family and a life fully lived.
I’m not sure how much I thought, initially and consciously, about whether the objects in the still lifes would mean anything to someone other than me. I was actually surprised, when I started to share and exhibit the images and the book, that they seemed to signify something to people other than myself. Viewers understand that the objects have meaning and history, even though they don’t know the details, and that seems to be enough for them to find emotional and sentimental power in them.
Challenges and perseverance: Documenting such a personal subject can be emotionally taxing. What challenges did you face while working on this project, and how did you navigate them?
I had moved my mother into a nearby “memory care” home, and visited her there almost every day I was working on the house. It was emotionally distressing to watch as her memory and cognitive powers declined, yet ironically the house seemed to come more and more to life in terms of the stories it was telling, in particular about her.
In spite of the developing project, my big task remained the clearing out of the house and preparing it for sale. This was a massive job given how much it contained, and that I was doing it entirely by myself. And also because I didn’t want to chuck everything into a dumpster or landfill. I tried very hard to find new homes for its contents, which added to the effort.
Role of the photographer: You mention wanting viewers to connect the images to their own experiences. How do you balance the personal and universal in your storytelling?
What’s interesting is that it was only during the process of creating the work, which certainly started from a more personal place, that I realized it seemed more universal in appeal than I’d imagined. In this it helped to have the feedback of friends, family, and other photographers. So I think you could say that any universal appeal, and viewers’ ability to connect the images to their own experience, grew organically out of the personal aspect.
Connection with the subject: As a son and photographer, how did your perspective shift during the process of creating this intimate body of work?
I certainly learned more about my original family than I’d known before. For example, my parents did a huge amount of academic research and writing, so there were reams and reams of paperwork because they never transitioned to the digital world! (I sent these materials to a half a dozen different archives.) And there was a ton of correspondence that I had to stop myself from poring over because there just wasn’t time.
That said, there were things I found, and that you see in the photographs, that I simply didn’t know the meaning of, or the full meaning anyway. Those things will remain a mystery to me forever.
Technical and creative tips: Your duotone images carry a somber yet reflective tone. What advice would you give photographers aiming to use tonal choices to enhance emotional impact in their work?
Before I decided to put the project together as a book, its primary form was as prints, just as with other groups of photographs I’ve done. The prints (which I’ve exhibited in a couple of places) are fairly large at 17x25 inches, extremely detailed, and very full-toned. In this respect I think they bear some resemblance to platinum/palladium prints. Their quality is the result not just of a sharp lens and high-resolution DSLR but also of careful technique that included the high-dynamic range imaging (HDRI) process.
I wanted my subjects to be rendered with a high degree of detail and a long, full tonal scale not only to make them beautiful but also so that viewers would be able to scrutinize and study the images. For the interiors I watched the spaces throughout the day and simply waited to shoot when the ambient light best defined them. As for the still lifes/boxes, I had no studio lighting equipment available to me, so I set up a large copy stand next to an attic window. Indirect window light has a beautiful, soft quality that seems to envelop objects, but it can still create dark shadows, so I sometimes placed a reflector card on the side of the subject opposite the window to bounce light back into the shadows.
More important, though, is that I used high dynamic range imaging for both the still lifes/shoot-downs and the interiors. I didn’t use it for the special effects that seem to be its primary purpose these days, but rather for its ability to preserve detail in the shadows and highlights even when they’re far apart in terms of brightness. I bracketed my exposures with as many as seven frames, spaced usually in 2/3rds-stop increments, the ones with more exposure to open shadows and the ones with less exposure to preserve highlights. This meant that the camera had to remain steady throughout the brackets to maintain image registration— the still lifes with the copy stand and the interiors on a tripod. I then merged the brackets into a single image using Photoshop.
Part of the trick of doing the book was to try to preserve the images’ detail. Its duotone printing process helped with this, but you really do have to ride herd on it to get it the way you want. Before printing I worked with one of Kehrer Verlag’s excellent prepress technicians to get the reproductions as close as possible to the prints. It helped that I’d shipped him a set of smaller “match prints” to guide the adjustments. Then I went to Germany to be on press with him. Even on press, given the sophistication of current printing technology, we were able to apply some degree of adjustment, though not as much as you can in prepress work, again using the match prints for reference.
Photography as a tool for reflection: This project explores the loss of identity through dementia and family memory. How do you see photography as a medium for addressing such profound and personal topics?
This is a new thing for me. The work is a curious combination of documentary, because I made the photographs in a pretty straightforward, representational way, and personal, because it’s more about my family and myself than any project I’ve done before. Of course there’s a whole stream out there of fine-art photography that’s personal, diaristic, and even confessional, and making that kind of work would be very hard for me, I guess because I’m “private” by nature. I think my stylistic and technical approach to As I Found It: My Mother’s House, letting the subject speak for itself, made it easier for me to share the images and my experience with viewers.
I should say that while most of my previous work has been outward-looking, based on observation of the world, I still find that it’s a good vehicle for reflection, albeit of a different, less personal sort. In fact the experience of traveling and looking for subjects is, for me, a kind of meditation in motion, one that lets me empty my mind of everything else. I have to say that the photography for As I Found It: My Mother’s House actually did not allow me to get into that state of mind in this way because the subject matter was so personal.
Advice for aspiring photographers: For those tackling emotionally charged subjects like aging, loss, or family history, what insights from As I Found It would you share to help them navigate the creative and emotional challenges?
Following on to what I wrote above, if you’re pursuing photographic ideas that are personal and inward-looking, I think you have to be careful not to get so far inside your subject that your images won’t mean anything to viewers. I think this would be an easy mistake to make. You really have to step back from the work and somehow evaluate it more objectively, so that it’s not just a gut-spilling endeavor.
One thing that helps with this, I think, is to share the work with friends, photographers, and/or people in the photography world as early as possible, to see what it means to them. Also, although I had no real family of my own to share this project with, I think it might be wise not to share it with family initially because they could bring the same preconceptions to it as you do.
To discover more about this intriguing body of work and how you can acquire your own copy, you can find and purchase the book here. (Kehrer Verlag, Amazon)
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