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Transformation in Loss

Shelby Roberts

Saturday, November 15 - 9:00AM to 10:00AM
NYFA: 3300 Riverside Drive, Burbank, CA, 91505

Going Home consists of thirty-four black and white images made in rural Oklahoma at the time of my father's death from lung cancer in 2011. In 1982 I left Oklahoma where I was born and raised with the intention of not coming back. In 2011 my father was diagnosed with terminal cancer. With my family's subsequent decision to take him home and give him hospice care, I found myself back in a town of six thousand people on the prairie. Through photographing the landscape and people there I discovered that I carry a profound sense of that place -- Prague, Oklahoma -- which is locked as much in my body as in my conscious memory. My father's death is not the point of these photographs but rather an element in the broader understanding of my connection to that place in its present and its past. For a child a parent is not a person but a place, their body is the location of safety and comfort or of fear and dread, it is the context against which the world is defined. Going Home is photographed with a medium format camera on black and white film. My choice of camera and film was motivated by a desire to distance myself from the work I was making. I know that if I had shot with a DSLR I would have looked at what I was doing, become overwhelmed and stop shooting. As it was, the film sat on my desk for a year before I brought myself to work with it. I now see that in the square black and white images that I made there is a reflection of the photographs my father made of me as a child.

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Shelby Roberts
Shelby Roberts

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