Liz Fernando

Trincomalee

My fathers stories and the lost photographs. This self published artist book is a work about a journey - a journey to a place where the object of a photograph is fragile and fugitive in its existence. My own biography and the research into the role of photography in South Asia highlights the different meaning that photography, the notion of memory and the personal archive occupy within non-western cultures.

In Sri Lanka, my father’s place of birth, humidity destroys the photographic object in a painful, slow and unstoppable process until it vanishes completely, as though it had never existed. As a result of this my photographic family archive does not exist instead the oral history became the precious but fragile and delicate string for my own identity and this work. It is not nostalgia but a sensual and naive story of a boy and a girl playing in the streets of the 1950’s post colonial Trincomalee, a city where a 40 years lasting civil war was yet to unfold. It is a story ambiguous and ungraspable, it is the story of the lost photographs of my father’s childhood and also allows space for the viewer to reconnect with his own memories.

Liz Fernando, born 1982 in West Berlin has recently graduated from BA Photography, London College of Communication and is currently exhibiting at Tate Modern in a group show. She lives and work in London and Berlin.

http://www.lizfernando.com