Three Generations of Possibilities

Digital Pigment print created with found photo 2019

I know very little about my first year of life. I know my birthmother took me home, then I was in foster care, then back with my birthmother, I don’t know how many times this happened. Just before my first birthday, I was given up for adoption. It was 1984; all records were sealed to ‘protect’ those involved. Preverbal trauma—that which occurs in the early stages of a child’s development with no way to express or contextualize feelings—lives on in our implicit memory.

I started this project as part of the 2019 RIFFS residency with the Photographic Center Northwest. I took the opportunity to work for the first time with archival imagery from my birthfamily, my adopted family, and found photographs I bought off eBay.

The search for identity, from an adoptee stand point, is a life long struggle.