your friend, ava: Back to the Future Part II

A while back I posted some beautiful photos from Irina Werning. Her series "Back to the Future" is brilliant and I love her attention to detail when replicating photographs from the past. It looks like she was in LA for some of them, and I wish I would have known sooner because I would have LOVED to be one of her subjects. About 8 years ago or so, back at CalArts, I had this project in my head about childhood that never got made. My mother was rummaging through the garage and found some vintage super 8 footage of me and my family in the early 1980s. It showed images of "Baby Ava" playing dress up (not too different from today), my 1st birthday is on film with brief images of my grandpa who passed on before I ever got to know him...

Footage of seeing my uncle in his late 20s holding me was really surreal, like from another realm, and just seeing myself as a child brought forth so much raw emotion. I wept, and thought, "I have to use this somehow". Something compelled me to use this footage, maybe to possibly relive my childhood in a way, but to come up with an execution was impossible at the time. The ideas were too vague back then. I know I wanted to evoke a certain feeling I got from watching the footage for the first time. I had some present footage of me, at the time, trying to act like a little girl while driving around my neighborhood. Reenacting the actual events, with pain staking detail, never occurred to me. I love how Werning's project takes these past photographs and recreates them, forcing the subject to re-live their childhood for just a moment. I would be curious to read about what kinds of feelings these images evoked for the subjects captured. Her photographs give me inspiration to finish what I started and just getting ideas out there is the first step.

Here are some more of my favorites. To see more, click here.