Until We Remember The Same

2013

This book comprises 730 photographs of the Sun that I and my half-sister had been taking simultaneously, at the same moment, albeit in different places, during the span of one year.
For an entire year, between May 2012 and May 2013, my half-sister and I were taking a picture of the sun at the same minute, wherever we were. What led me to this was our family history – the fact that we had not grown up together and Elena found out about my existence only in 2009. Shortly after we met for the first time, I realized that our relationship, however close in blood, was yet to be built. We did not share any bits of the past, we had no shared memories; there are no family photographs. It was a very strange feeling of both proximity and aloofness. The act of taking pictures as an everyday ritual was an attempt to get over something that could not be retrieved from the past; a means of building our library of shared moments, an archive of closeness.
Until We Remember The Same eventually turned into a book. It has a form of a double book – two parts, mine and my sister’s, joined together by their backs. Thus, one is not able to see the pictures from the same day simultaneously. A couple of pages remain blank – reminding us of the days when due to various circumstances, we forgot or were unable to take a picture; nevertheless, the blank pages are, in their own way, a record of a life lived, too.

This book is many things.
A question of what photography can be and for whom.
A witness to a ritual.
A rite of passage into connection and intimacy.
Evidence of a void that will never be filled.
This book: both utterly objective and totally subjective: a record of a full year’s weather and a record of deeply personal history.

Until We Remember The Same reconciles the coexistence of both the hopeful and futile, and how they sometimes play out in our lives, inseparable.