Tuesday 14 July 2009
Ben Alper
All images © Ben Alper
Ben Alper e-mailed me the other day to share some work from his project The Family Dig. He wrote:
"The Family Dig is a body of work explores my heritage through an examination of familial artifacts and contemporary portraits. The images in this series speak to the joy, melancholy, nostalgia and impermanence that encompass and define most familial heritages. Ultimately, my efforts to preserve my own family’s history can be seen as an attempt to immortalize this ancestry before it slips away like a faded memory. It is my hope that contrasting these relics with images of my family as they are today, will speak to heritage as a tradition that is fluid and ongoing, as a history that not only exists in the past, but also prevails in present".
Ben Alper lives in Cambridge, MA and is currently pursuing his BFA in Photography from the Massachusetts College of Art & Design. He is a founding member of The Exposure Project, a photo collective designed to facilitate and nurture collaboration across the medium. With this group, Ben has helped self-publish three photo journals, has put on various group exhibitions and, most recently, co-curated Graphic Intersections, a collaborative project loosely based on the Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. In addition, Ben’s work has been featured in Humble Arts Foundation’s Group Show, the Photographic Resource Center’s Northeast Exposure Online and F-Stop Magazine and Wassenaar Magazine. He was recently featured in the new online photography magazine Ahorn Magazine.