MISSING PERSONS

Being an adopted one, with no original ‘anchor’ as such, I am drawn to a sense of what is missing, to those who seem to have ‘gone missing’. We don’t have to have actually disappeared to go missing, as this can happen within.

There is, perhaps, sometimes this felt sense of something vaguely out of focus or of a displacement.

The pictures here are sourced vintage photographs of unknown children and families painstakingly blended into my own photographic imagery to create a sense of a nostalgic, unspoken mystery, perhaps a melancholy. It is like something you can’t quite put your finger on but is somehow unsettling.

They have each been an intimate discovery as each photograph has whispered what to do with them.

I have a famously poor sense of direction, of being nowhere in particular and yet being everywhere as well. A disorientation that is simply being somewhere without a mooring to a particular pinned location.

There, but not there.

These pictures are layered, as is our experience of

being human.

© Simon Dow / Photographic Artist / 2023