Text and photos by Julianne Nash.

I began working on the series “Unseeing” over three years ago. This body of work is simply just a visual artist attempting to understand what it would be like to completely lose ones vision, ones major tool of communication, love and passion.

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Please visit Unseeing, by Julianne Nash for the full size image.

I can recall a distinct moment in time, while sitting across the room from my grandmother many years ago, and becoming infuriated with her for continually asking me the exact same question within a moments time. Given, I was preoccupied with something I was reading and simply just nodded my head “yes” to her question. Little did I know, her macular degeneration had progressed so rapidly, that my head motion was simply a blur to her. She could not decipher my visual accreditation to her statement, rather presumed that I was simply ignoring her.

Please visit Unseeing, by Julianne Nash for the full size image.

Please visit Unseeing, by Julianne Nash for the full size image.

As a young girl, my grandmother assisted my single mother in raising my siblings and myself a great deal. Seeing the woman, of whom I never thought would approach her own mortality, unable to decipher my facial features from less than five feet away was traumatizing for a teenage artist. My initial response was to take as many images of her and my grandfather as I possibly could while they were still gracing me with there presence. I chronicled their home, and their life as much as I possibly could. I spent many weekends of my college career, skipping the fun parties, and sleeping over their house, in hopes of finding something indicative of their new life.

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However, with the progression of this project, my own “Catholic guilt” set in; I felt responsible for being able to see. I was scared of flaunting my ability to see to her, by creating images of her. I was extremely hesitant to offend her in any way. I began visiting for days at a time, and leaving with more unexposed film than ever before. I grew uncomfortable behind my ground glass in their home, because I started to register our shared mortality.

Please visit Unseeing, by Julianne Nash for the full size image.

Please visit Unseeing, by Julianne Nash for the full size image.


Macular Degeneration is a inherent condition. Meaning, there is a large chance that I will slowly lose my vision, too.

Nan Goldin once said:

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“I used to think that I could never lose anyone if I photographed them enough.
In fact, my pictures show me how much I’ve lost”.

This is essentially why I begun to physically degrade my negatives; in oder to somehow absolve myself of the guilt I felt being able to experience the world, and to battle with my own fears of absolute darkness. I compiled a stack of over 20 negatives that I cherished of my grandparents; images of us together, of adoring glances, and of treasures within the home. I doused them in bleach, cleaning solutions, salt and sugar, boiled them, burnt them—destroyed them in every way I could think of. In my own freaky way, this helped. I was able to understand the loss my grandmother was experiencing an a very personal manner; and was able to diminish my anxiety over losing myself, too.

Please visit Unseeing, by Julianne Nash for the full size image.

Please visit Unseeing, by Julianne Nash for the full size image.

With that, I broke barriers within my own photographic process, and was capable of creating much different work. I stopped fearing the camera, and it’s ability to render the seen and unseen. I took advantage of it.

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First off, I began to make many images using a simple pinhole camera. I was interested in breaking down my visual elements to it’s purest form—abstract color and shapes. I decided to place the pinholes in front of the moments in life that I cherish the most: sunsets/sunrises, snowstorms, stargazing, ect. The results were essentially the most abstract form visual relation I could accomplish at that time. Essentially, I was creating images that my grandmother could also enjoy. There were not details that she missed, or spots of darkness obscuring focus—they were simple enough for her to also enjoy.

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Please visit Unseeing, by Julianne Nash for the full size image.

Within that year, I also created a few large format 20×24” Polaroid images that further articulated my idea. The two most successful images were plays upon the idea of a “self portrait”, but through the eyes of my grandmother looking upon me…


For the first image I combined my mother’s face with my own. My grandmother has been confusing our faces from across the room ever since I hit puberty — and, to her benefit, we have strikingly similar features. Essentially, I covered half of the lens and exposed my mothers face on the film, processed it, retracted it and exposed half of my face on the opposing side. To the naked eye, there is confusion upon seeing it because our skin tones are deceivingly seamless.

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For the second image, I wanted to destroy an image of myself. Much like the degradation of my physical negatives, I chose to degrade my “one of a kind” 20×24 polaroid image, by creating a transfer print. To accomplish this, I over exposed my negative (in order to have enough sustenance to the negative to be able to remove the emulsion), and placed the emulsion upon a damp sheet of coarse watercolor paper. I used a printmaking roller to essentially “push” the emulsion off of the negative and onto the paper. The results are an almost terrifyingly obscure view of my face; seemingly melting and disappearing from the paper itself.

Please visit Unseeing, by Julianne Nash for the full size image.

Please visit Unseeing, by Julianne Nash for the full size image.

My hope with this work has always been apathetic. I have always wanted to bring light upon the fear of macular degeneration, in my own extremely personal way. I have always wished that the viewer would immerse themselves in the abstract images and question what they are actually looking at: to feel as if they are inside of a retina, or to understand the physicality of the “dryness” in her eyes everyday; or, to just feel, as an able viewer, to understand another’s struggles.

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And, most importantly, I wanted to pay homage to a woman I love and respect. To bring honor to her, for all that she has accomplished, and all that she will accomplish in her final days of coping with her sightless condition.

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Text and photographs by Clarisse d’Arcimoles.

Un-possible retour is a project in which I am reconstructing and re-photographing selected family photographs in the attempt to reconnect with the past. Drawing from a collection of family snapshots, I focus the attention sharply on the concept of aging while ensuring a consistency of location and use time as a collaborative partner, accepting its discrepancies and playing with the results.

Contact sheet (mother)
© Clarisse d'Arcimoles
Please visit Un-possible retour: the dialogues of time, by Clarisse d’Arcimoles for the full size image.

I re-examined the familiar scenes and landscapes that I have grown accustomed to seeing, and which have now become part of my past. Looking at these childhood images again, I felt as if I were seeing them for the first time. The fresh look I had on them made me uncover clues and notice details I had never paid attention to. I was interested to see not only what was photographed, but also why it had been photographed, and what had on the other hand not been photographed. I started building up my own renewed, adult vision of my childhood images. As new pieces of information emerged from the frozen past, my own mental image of them came into view, and I decided to materialize it by reconstructing the past into the present. Since then, I have been photographing exclusively my family, that is, a small ensemble consisting exclusively of my parents, brother and sisters, and of course my grandmother.

Camille (sister)
© Clarisse d'Arcimoles
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Family pictures are supposed to tell you a story about a happy, unanimous moment. They can be a way of reflecting one’s past and identity, but the pictures conceal just as much as they reveal. On the old snapshots we might not be more than five years old, and our spontaneity and naivety are striking, while on the day of the re-shoot we play artificial roles, posing as the candid children we have grown out of, for the sake of the image. I grew up partly in French Guyana so in the photos I was re-staging, the location sometimes had changed or become inaccessible and the objects and surroundings could not always be found or re-made. The moment when the original picture was taken happened naturally in a snap, with minimal control and no planning at all, while its re-creation can take several weeks of planning and several hours of shooting. But while the people had grown up, aged and changed, ageing is an ever-changing process by way of which familiarity and permanence may also be found.

The facial expressions I asked my family members to reproduce in order to evoke the child they once were, often proved to be their own and not just those of a child: this role play made them rediscover their self.

Carnaval (brother)
© Clarisse d'Arcimoles
Please visit Un-possible retour: the dialogues of time, by Clarisse d’Arcimoles for the full size image.

Every single detail is important and takes time to be checked carefully when comparing the two photos; the gap between young and old is not to be visible.

However, while un-possible return is a way back to childhood, by adopting the same position and facial expression, we unavoidably fail. We have to fail; there is no return in time.

Legos (Self-portrait)
© Clarisse d'Arcimoles
Please visit Un-possible retour: the dialogues of time, by Clarisse d’Arcimoles for the full size image.

This unfeasible return does not reproduce the past as such, but introduces a necessary dialogue between before, now and after, a confrontational dialogue that unveils the core of the pictured event, while ridiculing the unimportant, unnatural elements of that event. I re-shot an old fashioned photo of my mother as a child, taken in a professional studio, as it was the fashion to construct an artificially perfect memory of the beloved first child. By recreating this awkward situation, by obliging my mother to wear that theatrical precious smock dress again, by having her go to the hairdresser as her parents probably did back then, I re-contextualised all the ridiculousness of the old cliché. As my obsessive reconstruction went on, it became clear that the only real thing left was my mother’s sincere reaction to such a situation.

In the bath (Mother and sister)
© Clarisse d'Arcimoles
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In my parodic restaging of the near sacred family archives, the simple truth of the persons stays, while all the staged elements of the original cliché, which we thought were the truth themselves, find themselves disintegrated by comic effect. This confrontation of the glorified past with the sharp realism of present time uses ridicule to somehow clean up our memories from all their fakery.

I understood I would have to be extremely organised, as each photo restaging would take weeks of preparation. I grouped the photographs I wanted to re-shoot according to location. I had to plan my schedule around the availability of my protagonists, to book flights and train tickets between London, Paris and south of France, to make costumes and props; and most of all, always make sure that nothing would be missing on the day of the shooting. It was a crazy time. To achieve the photographs I had chosen, and especially the ones that pictured me as a child, I had to innovate with the relation between model and photographer. Indeed, I became the model and my inexperienced family members had to become photographers, under my instructions. Not only was I in a slightly uncomfortable position trying to reconstruct my identity as a child (both physically and emotionally) but I also had to teach my family how to use digital and manual cameras, trigger and flash kits!

Petit roi (Brother)
© Clarisse d'Arcimoles
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Most of the photos I restage were taken in the 90s; my brother, sisters, and I were the last generation photographed with film cameras and to have family albums. Now everyone uses digital, and we don’t really print photos anymore. My project will probably have a different meaning and impact in a few years time because of this. Technology also has changed so much that I often had to retouch colors or image qualities on Photoshop. My choice of lenses, format of cameras and films were dependent on the original image.

Un-possible retour is a way back to childhood, even if it is just for a short instant. Having the ‘very’ picture of being back in the past makes one feel so good! We were all children once, and that is something that always current within us.

Religieuse (Self-portrait)
© Clarisse d'Arcimoles
Please visit Un-possible retour: the dialogues of time, by Clarisse d’Arcimoles for the full size image.