She Thinks You’re My Son

This image is deeply personal to me and was one way I helped come to terms with the loss of my mum in 2019. Looking back I can also see that it was also, indirectly, helping with my father’s death many years ago and my estranged relationship with him.

I was approach to submit a piece for an exhibition titled “The Representations of Time” and was free to interpret that how I will.

My mum had not long passed away and for the last few months of her life had been cared for in a nursing home as she had dementia as well as other health issues. I had been looking at ways to use my photography to help make sense of the feelings I had as a result and came up with trying to represent things from my mum’s perspective.

The image I eventually created and submitted to the exhibition is titled ‘She Thinks You’re My Son’ and shows 9 images of me as a child with each one becoming less and less recognisable and represents the slow degradation of memory and recognition due to dementia.

The initial image I chose was a school photo of me and was one of a number of family photos she had beside her bed in the care home

As time went on it became clear that my mum no longer recognised me and this montage is both a representation of that fact and my way of coming to terms with it. 

One day when I was visiting mum and after a carer had been in to see us both my mum said to me ‘she thinks you’re my son’. Whilst I knew we were losing mum to dementia this was the clearest indication up to then of that sad fact.

I’ve used those words as the title for this piece…