Natasha Cohen-Carroll

    When I was young, I loved playing with my grandmother’s elbow skin: I was fascinated by the way it stayed in place, its elasticity, and the beautiful purple and green color of her veins.  Her arm became a place of exploration and discovery for me, though I kept returning to her watch. I would notice the way her watch matched her teeth, as the elegance of the enamel and metal played off of each other, and created correspondences beyond material and logic. In her skin, her wrinkles and creases, I would read the story these lines offered.

     Over the course of the year, I read other stories through other lines in visiting and photographing residents of the Bryn Mawr Terrace retirement home. By learning the language of this new territory, I realized that the folds of their skin were indissociable from the folds of their memory, as the text of the recollections they shared with me coexisted with the text that their body presented.

   In my visits and conversations, memories seemed not to merely deal with the passage of time, but with the oscillation between presence and absence, between moments of clear and blurred vision. At times, the absence became literal: within the course of my stay, one of the residents died, one was hospitalized, but their felt presence still informed my exploration. These photographs are the trace of what I keep with me, even after the lines disappear.