Mary Furlong tells Stephanie McBride how her photographic project with accompanying text delves into the memories of her childhood
Photographer Mary Furlong is inspired by ‘the commonplace and overlooked, hidden histories, everyday objects’, and her most recent work, Not the Location of My First Kiss, is ‘about memories, misremembering and mixing things up’. Undertaken during lockdown as a final-year degree project, it also incorporates text as a key component. Her website’s introductory image shows a clutch of old photographs, scalloped-edged and fading – snap-shots that would usually act as a trigger for memories. But Furlong reverse-engineers the process, starting with mem-ories, then constructing her photographs as resonances of them. ‘Everything starts with a memory. From that a pho-tograph is made and a piece of text written,’ she explains.
Caption for image: I made red jam sandwiches and Ribena for my lunch-es when I was in primary school, one lunchtime Linda Rochford, a girl in my class, brought me home with her and Mrs. Rochford gave me rhubarb tart.
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