Long D.

 

This is an ongoing project documenting my long-distance relationship with my girlfriend.

These photos allow me to reminisce about our time together, the memories that we share, and the growth of our relationship. The same way as I flip through my family albums with portraits of my parents and putting the pieces of their past into a full story. These photos represent love, bitterness, aloneness, the longing for stability and perhaps the innocent crush that makes us want to spend the rest of our lives with someone special.

Each portrait is paired with an environmental landscape, borrowing the idea of diptychs to provide context of the places that we were in. The mundane setting is an honest and raw representation of ordinary life, focusing on the simple beauty that is around our daily lives and environments. The photos are shot on various media, both analogue and vintage digital.

 

 

As much as we identify ourselves by nationalities and ethnicities, we are also defined by the people that we surround ourselves with, our friends, family, and dearest ones. As a young person that left home before maturity and adulthood to a foreign country without family and friends, I struggle to define and identify myself to a singular origin. When I think about my heritage, I resonate with where I come from, but also this western world that I do not fully belong in. I can only look to the constants in my life, which are the people that I hold closest.

My photography practice revolves around my personal life and finding details in the mundane. My creative process is different from my peers that have spent years in this industry. I am not used to creating with specific boundaries in mind. I used to consider my work insignificant beyond its aesthetics, however, through My Heritage, it made me realise how photographs are important visual artefacts beyond their artistic value. They reflect how we lived our lives, what we deemed important and the values that we cherished.