Inheritance catalogues the entirety of one man’s worldly possessions at the time of his death. The sum of the images creates a posthumous portrait of the deceased. My grandfather passed in 2010 and this project explores my process of mourning during the two years that followed. Alone in his house, I packed up his belongings to be kept, sold, donated or thrown out, organizing along the way by category. In many ways these photographs are documents of a performance, one in which the remains of a lifetime are sorted, documented and dispersed. The photographs also function as an acknowledgement to the ephemeral nature of life and an indulgence in man’s unwillingness to give in to this understanding – his desire to arrest time, to counter anonymity, to leave something behind, to be immortal.
