Jenny Owens

When I turned 30 I received an album of photos from when I was young and I realised that I had not thought about the objects that appeared in the background of these photographs in a long time. I also realised that I was unable to remember what existed outside the photograph. If I wanted to complete the rest of the details of the room that had not been captured in the photograph, I had to invent them. This led me to creating a new type of family album in the form of an artist's book called The Back Room. I took digital photographs of old photographs belonging to my grandmother and my parents, as well as of photographs that I had taken when I was younger or that I had found in a flee market. Using the zoom of my computer I found and extracted forgotten objects or pieces of scenery in the backgrounds of these photographs. I blew them up and gave them their own status by turning them into new images. The aim of the project was to give new life to old photographs, to connect different moments from different time periods and to present the viewer with a set of images from which to make their own stories.