Lisa Kereszi’s earliest photographs from her teenage years are of her father, her grandmother, and the family junk yard they ran for fifty-three years. For over three decades she has collected objects and moments through her camera, while also maintaining an interest in tangible, physical artifacts that extend our relationships to memories.
In early 2018 her father died suddenly, less than a year after her grandmother passed away. Managing grief from these dual and significant losses was made more difficult amid contentious family strife. When her father’s newly-erected headstone was toppled and had to be re-mounted, Kereszi was further distraught, and asked family members nearby to rig an off-the-shelf trail camera within view of the plot. Through that device and its auto-generated photographs, she could “visit” her father’s grave daily, though she was hundreds of miles away.
Kereszi amassed thousands of images over a seven-month period that culminated in the trail camera’s disappearance (it was later discovered tucked behind a headstone). With the forced isolation created by the pandemic, her life as a human, a mother, and a professor radically changed. Seeking order and control when the world provided little of either, she began organizing grids of the visual visits to her father’s grave. This album of her efforts to manage mourning is presented at scale to the hand-created book she lovingly compiled as a record of her grief.
In addition to Kereszi’s text and images, the book will include an essay by Marvin Heiferman.