Home, Away from Home by Justine Reyes (March 24, 2010) 
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Categories / Human Interest / Portraiture / / Click here to open comments section, click again when done to close / 3 Comments
Introduction by Monica Khemsurov and Jill Singer
In many ways, the jobs of a photographer and a writer aren’t so terribly different. As editors of the website Sight Unseen, our role is to look at the world through a lens of our own making, gathering people’s stories. The photography that accompanies these written works on Sight Unseen could well stand on its own, but we’ve become accustomed to presenting images as source material to illustrate and interpret our stories. We seldom have the chance to put the imagery first. For our presentation on Bite! magazine this week, we seized the opportunity to do just that, reaching out to photographers with a keen narrative sense of their own. The series they present here are poignant visual essays with no need for translation. Many of the photographers we chose are documentarians, who peer into the lives of everyday people and record what they find there, the others are multidisciplinary artists with a gift for storytelling and creative composition.
Former editors at I.D. Magazine, the design magazine, writers Jill Singer and Monica Khemsurov are the co-founders of Sight Unseen, a new journalistic and curatorial consultancy.
Weblink: sightunseen.com
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Our poll "A photo essay always needs a great written story" closed. 267 people voted, 28% agrees, 72% disagrees. 233 people answered our follow-up question "Are you a photographer?" 82% indicated they are, 18% said no. Initially, negative answers to question #1 were almost 100% as was the pecentage of photographers among respondants. Then, when the level of non-photographers started to rise, the percentage of people indicating good text is always essential started to rise too. This seems to indicate that non-photographers think that adding good text to your photo essays is essential. In my opinion: if you want non-photographers to dig your work, you know what to do...
I’ve spent the past seven years photographing my immediate family (my mother and two uncles) at home. After the death of my uncle Vinnie this work changed completely. I booked a trip for my mother, uncle Al and myself to Bermuda as a way to allay some of our grief. Since then we have traveled to Spain, Italy and Australia together. Home, Away from Home combines the photographs I take of them at home, with pictures of them in hotel rooms around the world.
After my uncle’s death I began focusing more on their fragility; my uncle Al’s broken nose or how tired my mom looks. The image of the empty bedroom represents my uncle Vinnie and his absence. The pictures of them at home are laden with my own fear of losing them and trying to capture fleeting everyday moments.
Away from home the hotel rooms become grand stages for dramas that never quite unfold. I focus on the subtle underlying tension created by being slightly out of place and out of one’s comfort zone and the little things we do to try to recreate a small piece of home wherever we go. By staging them in foreign hotel rooms designed to have the look and feel of domestic comfort, I begin to draw relationships between home and away from home both literally and metaphorically.
Justine Reyes (1978) lives and works in New York City, USA.
Click weblink justinereyes.com or browse our archives
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Great work.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by NewPhotoDigest, Justine Reyes. Justine Reyes said: Check out my Home, Away from Home series in Bite magazine! http://bit.ly/a9TuRv [...]
Such a lovely project! Its so true about how we are always trying to carry our comfort zone with us. Also, your images are very tender and striking. It makes me wish we could all see our family in such a compassionate way.