Matthew Austin

The work that exists in Wake started when I first arrived in Ireland in September of 2008 where I would be studying abroad for the next six months. My dad was evicted from his apartment the day after my birthday, September 8th: 6 days after my arrival in Ireland. The work really began as e-mail messages between my dad and I that were being sent multiple times a day. My dad continued sending me e-mails, but would include cell phone images from the eviction, and I would return the e-mails with my photographs of myself and my surroundings. Our e-mails persisted regularly for months and eventually I returned home to America. I began making photographs strictly of my dad and I hugging in various places of tragic relevance to our financial story (i.e. the storage bin where his belongings reside, our old apartment, the U-Haul rental building, and so on). As I continued photographing my dad, the process became intuitively based on my interest in connecting our family's personal story to the larger idea of financial tragedy in which our country's media poses as an understandable concept through numbers like 13.4 million unemployed or a 10% unemployment rate. I was interested in making a visual connection for people to make sense of this situation rather than through numbers that can't possibly represent any concrete visual for human understanding. During that process of continuing work based on my family's financial difficulties, a number of deaths occurred within my extended family. My mother's boyfriend Richie passed away due to cancer, his father figure Uncle Joe passed away from a falling injury at such an old age, and my cousin Mark died in a car accident at age 19: all of these happening in three consecutive months. Wake is a photographic narrative that represents these various struggles that have affected my family over the past few years. The book comprises my photographs and writing, along with excerpts of e-mails from my dad while I was abroad. By making metaphorical connections between our present economic time and physical death, I use this work to serve as a kind of elegiac document for these trying experiences. Wake functions as my personal understanding of our situation and an example of a story that is unfortunately familiar to so many others living in this generation.