/18 Family

Erica Nyholm

A Room of One’s Own II

Year 2009, I started to work on A Room of One’s Own II in order to construct an image of what I was and what I am. I staged myself far away from the camera. I was alone in a light blue room, on an island sundown behind me. I chose locations, which had an emotional appeal to me: my childhood home, a hotel where I woke up as a married woman, lake that has shared my family´s summer memories for a century. As I observed these isolated self-portraits I was missing my family. I realized that the self (no matter how lonely) is always in a relation to the other, time, space and yet in my opinion to the memories.

To create a picture of the self, I asked my siblings and family members to join in the pictures. We were sitting behind the table like the disciples in the Last Supper, standing in the same pool as an interpretation of siblinghood. The photographs became to represent my idea of subjective existence and desire to see the inner self in the form of photography. I agreed what Roland Barthes once wrote beside his album pictures: “You are the only one who can never see yourself except as an image; you never see your eyes unless they are dulled by the gaze they rest upon the mirror or the lens”. It signified me the interest to see a visual representation of a self in a shape of photography.

www.ericanyholm.com