Memories are uncertain. For many years, I had a vivid memory of being stung by bees. All of the details remained; I was about five years old, I had just picked a bunch of red clover, and I sat near a hive attached to a bench at the public tennis courts. Then a few years ago, I realized that no family member had ever mentioned this story. I asked my mother. It never happened. Was it a childhood dream, a story that I had made up?

The Victorians kept lockets of hair and miniature portraits painted with ground hair and pigment to secure the memory of a lost love. In much the same way, I secure my memories through photographic images rendered in lines of my own hair, the physical remnants.

When Roland Barthes writes about photography, he says, “the photograph does not call up the past. The effect it produces upon me is not to restore what has been abolished (by time, by distance) but to attest that what I see has indeed existed. I see not a memory . . . but reality in a past state: at once the past and the real.” Roland Barthes describes photography as evidence that “this-has-been”.

I take comfort in recreating what has been; and by making that evidence tangible, “what I see has indeed existed.” All everyday moments, as insignificant as they may seem, occur only once. I do not reproduce events, but quiet minutes, the mundane, the domestic, the private, the ordinary moments of human life.