Bree Rosberg

April 1962

"April 1962" is a series of self-portrait photos recreating photographs taken by my paternal grandmother in the early 1960s.

“In December of 2025, my father showed me a series of photographs taken by my paternal grandmother from the 1960s. The photos were taken with her first camera, playing and posing in ways that were new and unknown, contrasting the proper and poised positioning known from photographic portraits up to this point. This playfulness showed the side of my grandmother that, before this instance, I had been generally unfamiliar with. As my grandmother has begun to lose many of her memories, I have started to see a side of her that feels reflected in these photographs. I wanted to create a series that can preserve the memories she once had, as her memories of our time together are starting to disappear as well. My intentions are not to create a direct recreation of the original images, so as not to rewrite my grandmother's history with my own, but to bring them together, intertwining her past with my present. My body is posed in peculiar manners with the aim of keeping my face obscured from the lens. I do this as a physical way to embody my grandmother’s loss of memory and navigate through the complicated emotions tied to being forgotten.”