The Last Impressions of Home (2025)

After my grandmother passed away, I feared losing our family history. To preserve it, I documented our family home and garden through a project called The Last Impressions of Home, before it’s gone as well.

In this project, I transformed the house into a giant pinhole camera obscura, with each room acting as a camera. I placed light-sensitive paper on the walls, and through a tiny pinhole, the outside world was projected onto the paper, creating large-scale negative images of the garden and surroundings. These images captured the neighbourhood, trees, and parts of the house itself.

This project reflected my grief and anxiety over losing the house and its memories. The images of our surroundings represent our lived experiences. For me, home is a place of shelter and return.

Turning the house into a camera was challenging. It involved covering every window, converting the kitchen into a darkroom, and using the bathroom as a washing station. Working in total darkness inside an empty house, which had witnessed over a century of family life, was intense. The space felt suspended in time.

As I let light enter through the pinhole, the house felt alive again. Seeing the garden projected on its walls evoked deep emotions. The house became a canvas for memories, both lived and uncovered through the family archives.

Creating these photographs required care, patience, and precision: preparing the house, placing the paper, waiting for long exposures. Developing the images with makeshift tools, gutters as trays, a bathtub as a wash station, makes the process both technically challenging and deeply personal.

The resulting photographs are imperfect, with creases, fingerprints, and uneven edges. These imperfections are not flaws but integral elements that highlight the authenticity and intimacy of the work.

This project is about preserving memory and building a visual bridge between personal and collective history. It captures not just a house, but a home