This essay exists as an act of forming a memory of the unfamiliar, and as an exploration of presence — how it finds a way to reveal itself without its author, storyteller or original context.
The process of printing, scanning, framing, zooming in, putting apart and together again — as much as a tool, became a method of storytelling. Creating a coherent narrative that sequentially finds its way through scattered dishes, ghostly embraces and posed rows of glaring eyes, planting a feeling of familiarity in the unfamiliar.
This documented exploration comes to a question of itself — What does it mean to remember, feel alive in a memory not of our own?
For this text is the despair of the image, and worse than a blurred or fogged imgae — a ghost image...
After many hours, spread across many afternoons you have found yourself sitting in front of a lit-up screen of greens and blues, harsh for the eyes at this time of day, yet unable to stray them away. You have found yourself lurking in the corners of strangers’ houses, hidden away in piles of dirty dishes, ruffled sheets, moved chairs and beneath table cloths. After many late-night hours, you begin to seem to recognise corners of rooms that are not yours, yet they might as well have been. There is a sudden need — your lips trying to remember a name you do not seem to know, eyes shut, trying to read a face you may not have seen.
Photographs taken from Flickr groups “356 daily”, “banal”, “household” — by multiple anonymous users, collected over time from September 2025 until April 2026.
A stranger’s hand grasped within your own, sat around a table, round or rectangular or any shape at all for that matter, with calls of the world beyond (or above as some would prefer). those sat to the left or right of you — with their hands warm, their mouth calling names you might have never heard of before, names called alongside that of your grandmothers and great-grandfathers — their arms reaching for what could be that of their sisters, hoping to feel back the warmth of their breath and the hum of their fingers tapping along the cloth of the table. You are sat there, with an abrupt flash blinding all senses for no longer than a second, there with a lingering weight, laid heavy on your shoulders and chest.
By William Hope and William H. Mumler — photographs made upon the request of those pictured, dating from the 1860s until 1930s.
One of many afternoons, sat at a clothed table, a leather cover you recognise from all of many afternoons before. Great aunt’s firm hand with a golden piece, hugging the same ring finger as it always has. I am desperately trying to call out the face that Great Aunt’s finger is pointed at, before she does so herself, but my attempts are deemed unsuccessful once again. My eyes are met with a person in flat whites and greys once more, seeing their eager eyes, expecting to be greeted by a name — eagerness met only by the slow pace of Great Aunt’s words filling the kitchen air once again. I glance at my mother to my left — seeking the familiar confusion of furrowed eyebrows and scrunched nose, but met with no such. She seems to have sat through more of those long afternoons than I have, so in defeat, I return my gaze to plastic covers and glaring greys.
Initially used pictures of my own family archive — replaced with a found Internet Archive image collection of strangers at various gatherings, trying to mimic those of origin.