How do you remember a partially lost childhood?

Boston Globe

6 days ago

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Portraits, for instance, have always disappointed me. They seem too static, too sure of their form. They outline a face without revealing the soul behind it, offering certainty over the fluid nature of memory. I wanted something messier, something alive — something that stutters and breathes, that speaks in moments rather than posed perfection.
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Audio, not photography, is now the way I tell my stories. In the pieces I create, I weave together my own recorded retellings of the fragments of my life, including imagining the voices of my father, mother, grandparents, and the ancestors who left behind no photographs, no letters, no diaries. I compose my own voice into audio portraits that capture atmosphere, breath, and the soft hum of memory. They are not documentaries; they are performances — living, breathing reimaginings of my past.
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For a long time, I sought to reconstruct my childhood into a neat, linear story. But narrative demands order, and my memories, like all memories, are inherently unruly. So I turned to sound, and to the spaces between my words. I record the quiet moments as I speak: my pauses, my whispered confessions, the things I mostly remember but not quite. I seek to capture rhythms in the cadence of my voice the way a photographer freeze-frames a fleeting expression or a decisive moment.
To present the work to an audience, I sit in a darkened room with only a stool and a speaker for company. There are no images on the wall, no visual anchors, no light — only the sound filling the space. What I'm looking to create is a black box.
The audience enters the space and is seated. Then I close the door to the room and allow the darkness to settle. I press play, and the audience hears my voice as I recount memories from my life.
In my recently completed piece '20 Watts' (named for the amount of energy it takes the human brain to function), I told the story of my mother photographing her holiday table settings but then declining to take any pictures of me.
I come from a Jewish family that has long known the sting of loss and erasure — immigrants who changed their names, who embraced invisibility to survive. In our case, a photograph might be a luxury. It might also be a danger, a way to be identified and singled out.
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Someone once asked if I missed having more photographs of myself. I do, at times. But I feel, too, a deep loyalty to the kind of memory that does not rely on the visual for remembering — an archive of absence that is as potent as any picture.