This series, Fantasmas, was inspired by the Victorian-era Post-Mortem and the Hidden Mother Photography. Just like these two early photography practices; it attempts to memorialize a loved one by posing the living with the dead or by covering the mother with a veil to highlight the subject. Growing up, I longed to experience having extended family around me. My paternal family lived in Jordan and my maternal family in Puerto Rico with most on both sides being deceased. For this series, I used a projection of early photographs of my deceased maternal grandmother who died when I was 3, onto a living model. It explores the subject of death, the afterlife, and the longing for a connection with a deceased loved one. The darkness is used to symbolize death and the afterlife and the white represents the purity of the soul and the possibility of that soul becoming eternal and reconnecting with the living.







