3 Generations Back Home

American identity is often defined by ideals of exploration, individualism, and self-reliance, values deeply embedded in cultural mythology and reinforced through media. Yet, in scanning my family’s photographic archive, I encountered something different: a persistent visual language of repetition, continuity, and collective experience. Across generations, the same house frames graduation portraits. Children show  livestock at 4-H fairs in near-identical compositions. The archive reveals not rupture, but return—a quiet sameness that complicates the narrative of American independence.

This work draws from three generations of a single Illinois farm family archive, collaging historical images into contemporary views of the land. By layering past and present, the images reflect on inheritance, place, and the tension between the mythology of individualism and the lived reality of continuity.