I was talking with my family about my 98 year old great grandma who currently lives by herself in Fayetteville and how I needed to go visit her. I thought it could be sweet to take updated portraits of her for my family to have. When I got there and started taking photos, it slowly became more of a documentation process of her life, home, and memories collected there as well, which is how my concept ultimately came about. For the most part, I just sat and talked with her (which with Granny Dill, it’s mostly her talking and not being able to hear you when you talk back). I listened to her talk, and she showed me all of her collected photos from over the many years: her old portraits of her when she was young, her grandchildren, her late husband and son, my own father as a child. 

During this, I felt a prevalence of a deeper type of loss within her, one that results from knowing what a full and abundant life and family looks like as well as what it is like to live with the loss of them. I hope through my photos to depict this difficult balance that is often not thought about with the elderly. I aimed to capture this abundance of memories and life that she lived, whether that's through showing the textured wrinkles of her face or the photos she keeps in her house, while balancing this with an emptiness of the house and heart. An empty chair, precious goods boxed away for later, old clothing to be passed down. I wanted there to be a sort of reflectiveness to all of it in order to reflect the time spent there with her as we rummaged not just through her physical mementos, but her mental ones as well. Altogether, I hope the sequenced photos bring both a sadness and a fullness to the viewer as they get to see a life well lived and a heart that has also lost a lot.