Rocking Chair

My grandmother kept a rocking chair just inside the front door. Seven grandchildren vied for it with the seriousness reserved for the small hierarchies of family life. When we were very young, the chair was where we climbed onto her lap. As we grew older, we kept seeking something in it that childhood knew how to ask for without ever putting into words.

Years later, that connection resurfaced when I found a domestic memory within a practice I had never associated with my family. The photograph opened a passage between different periods of my life without needing to explain how they belonged together.

The chair eventually disappeared from the house, and my grandmother was gone. What remained was an emotional architecture built through small, repeated acts: waiting your turn, taking your place, falling asleep beside her, returning whenever we could. Some household objects gather a history that no label could ever capture. Their value comes from the lives that have passed through them.

Photography has this strange ability to reopen rooms that no longer exist. Skateboarding brought a rocking chair back into my memory and, with it, a childhood I now recognize as a privilege.

Perhaps that is what photography does best: it gives memory a place in the present.