DAPHNEE M. OCHOAA CELEBRATION OF LIFE

“Sometimes, no matter how much faith we have, we lose people. But we never forget them. It’s those memories that give us the strength to go on.”

- Unknown

For me, photography has always been about creating a collection of moments that express the irony of my constantly changing life. Photography has been the means to freeze and preserve these moments for me to look back on later. Most recently, as a result of the death of my boyfriend, I’ve come into contact with a group of people – a family – that has taught me an incredible amount about life, change, and dealing with loss. For this project, instead of choosing to mourn the loss of his life, I’ve chosen to show how, in the face of that loss, we strive to live our own lives to the fullest. It’s a statement about celebrating life, and amidst the celebration, recognizing that it’s acceptable to have moments of sadness of being purely lost in thought.

In some photos, I place myself as the outsider surveying the scene, without a comment on what is actually occurring. But in the scenes with his more immediate family, I hope to show more of my involvement and relationship with those I am interacting with. I also combine shots of the landscapes in Rochester where his family lives, because of how new it was for me to see, grow-ing up in the city and then living in a suburban town. As a whole, the town of Fairport in Roches-ter combines a homey feeling in both the expansive landscapes as well as my relationships with it’s inhabitants. I’ve never had this growing up, and being able to experience traditions for the first time as well as beginning to understand this sense of ‘a family’ has been an eye opening experience. While he was alive, I was always shooting photographs because it was something I enjoyed doing. Now that he’s gone, my photographs have become my way of remembering him.

My photos recall specific moments in time, and I know that, some day, somebody can view all of my photographs and see life through my eyes – a compilation of moments I will never be able to physically experience again, but be able to go back and remember how I felt in that moment. This is what I hope to capture in my work: Something that will live on and help people remem-ber long after the physical evidence of it is gone.