my mother’s demen-

tia became so severe that she could

no longer stay in the rambling New

England Victorian where she had

lived for 40 years, most of that time

with my father, it fell to me to empty

and sell the creaky old manse. Once

my mother was out, I essentially

moved in and spent the better part of

a year sifting through a dense envi-

ronment created by decades of hoard-

ing, deeply compounded by the Yan-

kee habit of saving too much from

past generations.

The house contained thousands of

cardboard boxes, often several nested

inside a larger one, stacked up in lay-

ers against the walls. In the attic, these

stacks created a virtual maze.

Despite my mother’s ceaseless accu-

mulation, a lot of what she left behind

in her boxes was neatly ordered,

though in ways that might have made

sense only to her—a system she was

no longer able to explain. Much of

it had been heavily annotated, often

on index cards or Post-it notes as old

as their invention, in her tiny, pre-

cise handwriting.

She was obsessive-compulsive, a

behavior that dementia cured.

The task was the most emotionally

difficult thing I have ever done. As

a way of mitigating my sadness and

solitude, I took pictures. At first, I

photographed the gorged interiors of

the rooms, broadly and closely, and

continued as each room was emptied

of its life. In the vastness of what my

mother had squirreled away were

hundreds of cardboard “trays”—

often boxes she had sliced the tops

off with a utility knife—in which she

had arranged groups of related items,

most of which had outlived their use-

fulness. I also began to photograph

these collections by the light of an

attic window. Toward the end of my

clearing out the house, these assem-

blages took over the project.

Photographing what I found in these

boxes, which I didn’t rearrange in any

way, was simple in concept but surpris-

ingly complicated in execution. I set up

my solid old Polaroid MP-4 copy stand,

which has a long rail that allows more

“working distance” than most such

models, directly in front of an attic win-

dow that was formidably high on the

house, unobstructed and north-facing.

I oriented the stand with the rail

on the far side from the window so it

wouldn’t cast a shadow on my sub-

jects; this way, they would also be lit

gallery-style, from the top. I mounted

my 24.6-megapixel Sony Alpha a900

DSLR on the copy stand, and because

my mother’s trays and boxes were quite

variable in size, I chose an A-mount

Zeiss 24-70mm f/2.8 T* zoom for

the work.

Text & Photography by Russell Hart

A year-long photography project helped a photographer deal with losing his mother to dementia

When

As I

Found It

 digitalphotopro.com January/February 2020 | 35