*This collection began by trying to use a machine to recreate a memory.* \
*I gathered old family photographs - some mine, others collected from friends, relatives, strangers. I trained a model to learn what a family looks like: the poses, the lighting, the closeness, the distance.* \
*What came out wasn’t memory.* \
*It wasn’t even family.* \
*It was something stranger.*
*A series of images that felt almost familiar - like dreams passed off as truth. Children who never age. Faces that repeat. Smiles that don’t quite reach.* \
*The machine wasn’t recreating what was.* \
*It was inventing what it thinks we want to remember.* \
*In spirit, this series echoes Gerhard Richter’s blurred photo paintings - where history is softened, identities dissolve, and what remains is the emotional residue of what might have been.*
*But here, the blur is digital. The memory never existed.* \
*This is the result:* \
*33 portraits of ghosts, stitched from borrowed lives.* \
*This isn’t nostalgia.* \
*It’s recognition, disfigured.* \
*It’s love, simulated.* \
*It’s memory—remembered wrong.*
m0dest