Recently, my great-grandmother’s (which became my great-aunt's in 1979) house in Nantucket was sold. After over sixty years in the family, the house had come to represent everything that went unsaid, buried, neglected. It was a physical record of the family’s expansion, a testament to tenuous and possibly spurious filial connections, and a remnant of truths begging for exposure—an exposure denied by the very illusions that the family upheld within the home. In its very physical essence, the house is a neutral element in this struggle, it is through the marks of time, the photographer, and the audience of the photograph that distinct constructions of meaning, nostalgia, and history emerge. |