EMMA PALM - EXPOSURE EMERGING PHOTOGRAPHERS SHOWCASE

On June 26th, 2012, my seventeen-year-old brother died by suicide. In Memory is a product of love and longing, made in the wake of his death. Created over the last eight years, this body of work represents an incomplete attempt to catalogue what he left behind and an ongoing effort to trace the shape of his legacy.

The circular prints in the series layer scans of my brother's personal objects (elevated now to reliquary status—holy, because he touched them) with fragments of snapshots from my personal photo archive—moments and spaces we shared. They function as portals—acutely intimate gateways to memory opened without warning by any variety of sensory experiences, trick of light, or offhand comment.

The first set of portraits was created a year after my brother's death. I asked his best friends to "meet me in a place where they remembered him" and let me take their portraits there. Their gaze, conversation, and presence in my life is no less ghostly now than it was seven years ago. They too transport me, albeit forward instead of back—into the possibility of other worlds and what "might have been.” As I continue to connect and make portraits with them, I look to their faces, the way they carry their bodies, and the new lines etched across their flesh for traces of my brother's legacy, wondering what endures, what disappears, what might be carried quietly, and what still screams.

BIOGRAPHY

Emma Palm is a visual artist and photographer living on Treaty 7 territory in Calgary, Alberta. She completed her Bachelor of Fine Art with Distinction at the University of Victoria in 2013.

Working with 35mm and medium format film, collage, writing, and analogue printing processes, she poses and plays with questions of legacy, memory, and livelihood. Her practice is largely informed by her rural Alberta upbringing, a strong sense of home and inheritance, and a series of significant losses threaded through her twenties—including the deaths of her father and brother. Her work reflects upon the traces and monuments we leave behind through a lens of personal documentary and social research.