Photography and the Familiar: Reflecting on the Photographs of Amal Amer, Ann Le, and Adee Roberson

By Loujain Bager

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.

― Susan Sontag , On Photography (11)

While studying art history I learned about the concept of memento mori, a Latin phrase that translates to “remember you must die” aimed to remind us of our own mortality. This was often depicted by particular iconographies such as skulls, clocks, flowers, candles, and fruits. Although including these symbols is common in depictions of the concept of memento mori they are not the only reminders of our fleeting mortality. Photographs rupture the notion of time by capturing a moment in time that would have once been a fleeting memory. Photography expresses our mortality by encapsulating memories of places, people and time. 

In my apartment I have photographs of my family members taped to my walls honoring some who I never had the chance to meet while they were alive. Despite never having met these family members, having their photographs allows me to share space and connect with them in my own home. When I moved to California, I had never visited the state, was moving to a new space, and for the first time, I was living alone. Having the photographs of my family members and the places where I grew up was healing and comforting to me. 

In a similar manner, three artists in one never remembers alone--Amal Amer, Ann Le, and Adee Roberson--use photography to visualize and connect to family members by transmitting images of different cultures, homelands, and time periods through their artwork. I was interested in how each of the artist’s works are part of a larger photographic series and how each artist utilizes layering in different ways. In Amer’s autobiographical Hayat series (2017), they layer personal objects that belong to their family members and other cultural signifiers to create large-scale digital photographs. Le’s World Wars series (2019) is a photomontage series that overlays archival images from the Vietnam War with her own family photographs. While in Roberson’s West Palm Beach (2019), she screen prints bright colors onto family photographs and displays them on a wallpaper produced from a Jamaican restaurant menu.

Amer includes synthetic and genuine flowers alongside personal objects belonging to their Yemeni family in their photographs. Le uses documentation of her own family photographs with famous photographs of the Vietnam war. Roberson explores her connection to Jamaica through screen printing on archival images of her family and the wallpaper print of the Jamaican restaurant. Each of the series use different techniques but ultimately they are about the artists’ families. The photographs are able to encapsulate time and although I never met Amer, Le, and  Roberson’s family members represented in their photographs, I am able to relate to them.