Faculty of Art

Integrated Media

Bree Rosberg

Fictionalized Family Fantasy

Using Letraset, I obscure the faces of myself and my brother from old family photographs using descriptive text in relation to the context of the image.

“In 2006, my mother took dozens of photographs of my brother and I to be sent to my paternal great-grandmother, Helen. These photos were supposed to show the daily lives of my brother and I, as Helen did not know us personally. My mother posed us for each picture, taking away from the natural sibling chemistry between my brother and I, as both of us felt discomfort when having our photos taken. We became a fake version of ourselves, performing our lives for a stranger because our parents said we had to, becoming the idealized version of what our family could be. Not long after the photos were printed and mounted on coloured construction paper to be sent across the country to Helen, she passed away. The photos never served their purpose and were placed into storage. The original intention of the coloured paper was to have written descriptions of the context of each photograph on them and how they related to our daily schedule. I take vintage Letraset in and layer it over the images, covering the faces of my brother and I. The choice of font colour, size, and style was decided based on what felt institutional because of the unnatural advertisement of our sibling connection in the photos. The words printed over our faces reimagines the way in which each photograph would have been described for Helen. By covering our faces, I get to reclaim the images that present a fictionalized version of our family and myself. The original negatives of the photographs are gone; therefore, these are the only copies that remain. By using Letraset, I can permanently augment the physical photographs to remove myself and my brother from this "Fictionalized Family Fantasy". ”