• LEGACY-ALZHEIMERS STORIES_MEMORY WITHOUT LANGUAGE.jpg
  • LEGACY-ALZHEIMERS STORIES_PRIVATE LITERATURE.jpg
  • LEGACY-ALZHEIMERS STORIES_THE ART OF ATTENTION.jpg
  • LEGACY-ALZHEIMERS STORIES_IN FAVOR OF SURVIVAL.jpg
  • LEGACY-ALZHEIMERS STORIES_THE STRONGER THE STRANGER.jpg
  • LEGACY-ALZHEIMERS STORIES_MY ONLY HOMELAND.jpg
  • LEGACY-ALZHEIMERS STORIES_GUARDIAN OF THINGS.jpg
  • LEGACY-ALZHEIMERS STORIES_A DEEP CHAOS.jpg
  • LEGACY-ALZHEIMERS STORIES_MEMORY MADE PUBLIC.jpg
  • AN EXPECTATION OF LIVING
  • FRACTURED FAIRY TALE
  • JOINING THE THOUSAND
  • IMMEASURABLE DISTANCE
  • AWAITING A MIGHTY STRANGER
  • INNUMERABLE PIECES
  • FORGET ME NOTS
  • HAUNTING PLACES RARELY ENTERTAINED
  • THE PLEASURE OF REMEMBERING
  • THINGS TIME CANNOT TOUCH
  • DREAMS OF THE SOFT LOOK
  • Inadequate Protection Against the Elements
  • Desire for Fluency
  • Drinking Tea in the Mud
  • Incomplete Emotions in the Present
  • Greatness in the Small Things
  • Unappeased yearning to Return
  • Mark It With a "B"
  •  Not So Magic Mason Jar
  • Longer Than Knowing Even Wonders
  • Part of You and Part of Me
  • The Sorrow it Brings
  • The Fourth Sister
  • Preparing for Winter
  • Jumbled Notions
  • Hope of Becoming a Memory
  • Memory is a Whisper - Silent Witness
  • Memory is a Whisper - Speak Volumes with No Words
  • Memory is a Whisper - The Fickle Power of Girlhood
  • Memory is a Whisper - Poor Harvest
  • Memory is a Whisper - I Slip Through

Memory is a Whisoer

Memory is a Whisper

Statement

Wade’s Grandmothers (Gram and Granny) were both diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease in within months of one another. They lost the battle a few years later, again within months of one another. As a result, she has become obsessed with absorbing her Grandmothers’ and consequently her own past. As they struggled to retain their identity and their memories, she is now determined to gather them and add them to her own.

Collected items and personal locations belonging to and inspired by Wade’s matriarchal lineage are the heart of this work, alongside her physical and emotional inheritance. She uses herself as a representation of all the women who came before alongside everyday things laden with stories themselves and so many memories. Her own memories and those given to her by family, plus a vast collection of family photographs, she builds narratives within the frame. Through the years and through the course of creating, the narrative stray into personal reflections. Gram and Granny spent their entire lives in Oklahoma. The state was in their blood and in their souls. No matter where she makes photographs, the aura of this homeland is a constant presence in the images. Almost her whole family still lives in Oklahoma. With the recent death of a favored aunt, the first loss from her mother’s generation, Wade has recently seen the focus of the work shifting to the next group of women in her family.

This work was initially sparked, and continues to live, as a reactionary coping mechanism, a way to deal with loss. Wade adds images to the series when she learns something new about her family or when a song, a smell, a story, or a dusty object in an antique store speaks to her of familial history. All images are captured with a 1947 4x5 Graflex Press camera and archivally printed in editions of 25.