I went to graduate school a year after my mother died. I had wanted to be back in New Mexico for graduate school, and felt fortunate to be accepted to the photography program in Albuquerque. In addition to having long admired the program, It was a chance to be close to my family and I was pretty clear that any artwork I would be making would involve processing her life and the aftermath of her death.
Years after I left graduate school, I was trying to organize some negatives and I found this treasure trove of images I had made around Albuquerque and Los Alamos while I was in school. I had been visiting my grandparents in Los Alamos on weekends for a while, and had started photographing the city and their house with a Holga.
My grandfather was a larger than life figure. My grandmother called him a "complicated" man. Most of the images I took on those visits seemed to center around him and the fantastic projects he had engineered around the house in the forty years he had lived there.
The Holga images were mostly processed and put in a box along with their contact sheets. They didn't seem like graduate-school work; I felt like I was supposed to be doing things that were more important.
So when I found the box of images years later, there was a real sense of loss. The best, most honest work of those years had been ignored in a legitimate effort to just finish school and get on with living.
I've really felt compelled in the last year to finally do something with them. Here you go.