How She Was

Early 2010s/2019

The photographs in How She Was show words and images from a journal “written” by my mother as she was losing her bearings to Alzheimer’s. Although her awareness was fleeting, somehow there was still a definite glimmer of who/how she was, which inspired me to make straight forward prints of her journal as an homage to her struggle. Several years later, in 2019, I started to see fragments in the full page images that I realized were complete in themselves - beautiful, alive and haunting.

The pages of the journal were scanned so the Archival Inkjet Prints can be large and painterly, or small and intimate. I like when they’re close to the size of a postage stamp.


Mom: Writing with Alzheimer’s Photographs by Nancy Hellebrand, Brenau University, Gainesville, GA, 2017