This project was very personal to me mainly because of my experience of chemotherapy followed by a bone marrow transplant in order to battle leukemia in the year 2009. In the abyss of hardship and fear of death, my sister’s full matching bone marrow saved my life from the fatal disease. After 2 years of survival, I started to look back the history of my personal relationship with my sister. I eventually realized that she not only physically saved my life, but also has been my greatest mentor who taught me how to have positive attitude in life.
In this project, I wanted to explore my own personal relationship with my elder sister through using both old and new pictures. Overall, The whole sequence is basically a short visual letter to my sister. First I decided to give each image the Polaroid effect in order to instill sense of nostalgia. On each Polaroid image, I put a memo that supports the idea of each image. Also, I used a stock background of wooden pattern, which gives retrospective sensibility. This chronological sequence of images also shows short notes. I wanted to keep notes on images as compact and effective as possible because I mainly wanted the images to tell the story.
The idea of ‘Punctum’ is prevalent in this project. For example, the third image, which shows us smiling in the hospital, delivers something beyond our physical state. Even in times like this, our smiles deliver the essence of our shared personality: positivity. The last image also a good example of Punctum, for its honest portrayal of my sister and me. This simple and casual image doesn’t really stand out on its own. However, the context provided by the previous images helps viewers have more insights about my closer relationship with my sister. My use of Punctum was mainly inspired by Carrie Mae Weems’ series of personal photographs shown in the class material. Her use of casual images, through which she provides subtexts in her family history, really interested me.
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