The work is centred around my family archive, particularly photographs by my grandfather and parents taken during the years they lived and studied in the United States. Decades later, I have travelled to many of the same places while pursuing my own graduate education in photography. By revisiting these locations and creating new images, I’m trying to trace a visual connection across generations to observe how certain journeys continue to repeat within a family.

My grandfather, who I never met, was both a poet and an engineer, and is an important figure in this project. His life represents the coexistence of analytical thinking and creative expression, two qualities that continue to influence the way I approach photography. The title, Poet-Engineer and Other Stories, refers not only to him, but also to the many personal narratives contained within our family photographs. These images function as fragments of stories that document moments of departure, ambition, and belonging. 

The archival photographs themselves became the raw material I worked with throughout the project. Rather than treating them simply as documents of the past, I approached them as physical and emotional objects that could be revisited, altered, layered, and reinterpreted. For several of the images, I created empty silhouettes of the figure in the original photograph, particularly my grandfather. This is a means of indicating that I never actually knew him as a person. Much of my understanding of him has been constructed through stories told by family members, through the photographs he left behind, and through his poetry. By obscuring parts of the figure, I wanted to acknowledge both presence and absence, the tension between intimacy and distance that exists when trying to understand someone through fragments and memory alone.

At its centre, this work examines what it means to inherit not only photographs, but also the aspirations and uncertainties they contain. Through this project, I reflect on how migration can be both deeply personal and broadly universal. The photographs become a way of understanding how identity is shaped by memory, geography, and the repeated act of leaving one place to build a life in another.