Memory

This photo, by Michael Marfione of Staten Island, NY, won first prize in Emory University's "Picturing Home" juried photo exhibition. Marfione says it is part of a current project to reconstruct and photograph specific memories from his childhood, because he lacks documentation of his childhood. Marfione says it is a type of storytelling he can share with his heirs. "I investigate the tension between the artifice of photography and the depiction of a human situation as real emotion," he says.

According to the jurors, Julian Cox, curator of photography at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and Jason Francisco, associate professor of photography at Emory and chair of visual arts, the photos in the exhibit respond to an open-ended question: "What is home and where is it?"

They add, "the photographic works in this gallery explore the plurality and the contrariety of a potent word." 

Selected from more than 700 submitted images representing the work of over 130 photographers, the pictures examine what it means to look for home, to find home, to lose home, to be at home, and to test home against challenges that are by turns personal, familial, national, and global. Some of the works rely on the power of a single image, as if held against a surrounding silence, while others use combinations of photographs, or photographs together with texts, toward narratives that are discretely summoned, if not fully disclosed.

"Home" emerges from these works as a site of affection and reckoning in equal measures, as fragile as it is secure, and as elusive as it is longed for.

The exhibition is up through Jan. 29 at Emory