Anna Krachey
Mom, 2007
archival ink-jet print
20"h x 24 "w

Anna Krachey
by Amanda Douberley

Photography, perhaps more than any other art form, has a powerful connection to memory. We take photographs to preserve memories, sometimes with the result that photographic images come to shape our recollections of the past—as with those pictures from dimly remembered childhood, which seem to bolster our ability to recall a birthday or a family vacation otherwise lost to us. Conversely, there are those memories that function like photographs, which are so clearly and indelibly etched into our minds they may as well be printed on paper.

Anna Krachey's photographs are reminiscent of such memory images. Krachey takes members of her family as her subject, crafting informal portraits in loose series. She uses place as a sphere of interaction to characterize her family; more simply, what is in the photograph that is not her mother or her brother or her husband is just as important as the individual pictured therein. For example, one pair of images chronicles her mother's recent hospitalization. Krachey's mother is herself a healer who grew up in rural Ireland. She is the ostensible subject of only one of the two photographs, where she sits up in bed wearing headphones, her hands poised in mid-air as if she were directing an orchestra, apparently listening to music. In the other image, a tasseled lilac cloth drapes a small television set that sits on a stand in the corner of the room like a shrine, with a remote control carefully positioned on top. The veiled television sits in dialogue with the cords and monitors behind Krachey's mother, speaking to the overwhelming number of electronic instruments that fill hospital rooms. In fact, the lilac cloth becomes a stand-in for the woman who placed it over the television, extending the field of the portrait from the first image into this second one as well.

Small details like the lilac cloth stand out in our most vivid memories. But, what decisively ties Krachey's photographs to memory images, for me, is the brilliant quality of light in each print. White light fills the room and illuminates the face of Krachey's mother, reinforcing the woman's ebullient appearance despite her present circumstance. A portrait of Krachey's husband, which was taken at the magic hour just before sunset, glows with an intense yellow-orange light. Such conditions, like memories, are fleeting. The magic hour is tied to impermanence as it comes with the transfer from day into night. In its forceful yet fading beauty, we can only watch as it slips away and try to remember what we've witnessed. Anna Krachey's family photographs act as a witness to that same fading beauty, the same fleeting moments that fill our memories.