memory.21

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