Chronicles of a time that is passing by, photo essay by Dorian François.
During the summer 2014, my grand-mother and my grand-aunt had health problems. The first was on her final stage of the Alzheimer disease, the latest got suddenly ill and started to become mentally crazy.
Within a month from each other, they both died. It’s during that period that i’ve started to consciously taking pictures and writing notes during my visit to them.
Facing the sudden change in my grand-parents’s life, i suddenly felt the need to keep a trace of it and face their reality: elderness, solitude, physical and mental isolation, memory loss, the strange relationship between childhood and death.
It’s been a year that i am monthly visiting my grand-father, spending a lot of time together. Since then, he had to leave his house because he could not take care of himself anymore. My father and i took care of his things and managed to find him a place in the same retirement home as my past grand-aunt. It was the best option since he knew the place and that it is in the city he lived at all his life: Bergerac (in the south-west of France).
I feel lucky to be able to share that with my grand-father, i guess he feels happy to see me that often and i’m learning a lot about him, about what it is to be a family.
He sees every picture i take. I gave him a first dummy book of this project months ago, he didn’t say much about it but it’s been the only item on his desk at the retirement home ever since.
This «project» is still on-going, what i’m showing here is the start of it, what happenned in the summer 2014.
