Baba

My great-grandmother was born in 1902 and died in 2004. She lived a life too long, too wise, too sad. In the last two years of her life, I searched for the woman she was. What kept her going; what miracle protected her from illness in time of no medicine, from bombs in time of war, from repression in times of totalitarianism, from the madness in the face of loss – from her mother as an infant until her youngest child. Her portraits are memories, history at its fullest, life out of space, disembodied femininity, and longing for the material. I realize now that I have photographed her as the embodiment of sovereignty. It shows a century of the history of a woman and sets it against the history of a nation in the same period.