Family Stories (1988) The Letters

This series was commissioned by Finn Thrane, former director of Denmark’s Museum of Photographic Art, for an exhibition about different family pictures with a photographer form each of the Nordic countries. My family pictures point back in time. They were based on letters my mother wrote to her own mother in Iceland between 1932 and 1946 - from when she arrived in Copenhagen as a girl until her death 14 years later. For 20 years I kept the letters in a shoebox without reading them. It had been to painful before, but I now had a project that made it easier to open them. As the work progressed I also started using family photograms my father had taken with a Kodak camera. I took my first photographs with the same camera.