Dennese Victoria
Days Spent With Pretend Family

In October 2016 I began working on what I had then called a fake family album. I was thinking very deeply about how easy it can be to fake intimacy. Having filmed documentaries as well as advertisements that used the pretence of a documentary, I would always encounter the pressure to perform for the image.

As the person behind the camera one knows when something is not there anymore. Needing material to match the narrative, in some cases you ask people to look a certain way, to smile, to do things they haven’t done in a while, things they don’t feel like doing anymore.

An invitation to pretend, an opportunity for an alternate life lived in photographs – Where can we go if we begin with this agreement? I searched for characters, at first preferring people who “had lived through something,” but then ending up with people who, as I was to learn, were merely generous enough to lend me time while I realised that though I had been telling them to pretend, I had also been asking for something true, for something real.

I found a house. My brother joined the project and then the questions changed. Who was I, and why was I there? A photographer, yes, but was I family? Am I a friend? What were our obligations to each other? How much can memory be recalled, reimagined, replaced?