My mother and father died 36 and 19 years ago, respectively, so I’ve spent the majority of my life remembering them through family photographs. These photographs document their optimistic first years of marriage, my own birth and early life, the onset of my mother’s schizophrenia, her death by suicide, and my father’s subsequent alcoholism and death. In spite of this situation, the thousands of photographs my parents took over many years became a survival guide for my future self, and ultimately led to my interest in photography. My current work hinges on photographing aging suburban domestic settings (where the promise of the American Dream has revealed itself to be an illusion) and merging these images with the surviving archive of domestic imagery I inherited. Although the work is intensely personal, my goal is to provide enough context so viewers can find their own way into the images.
Steven Lang
