When I was young, one of my favorite grandmother’s house activities was to sit with her and go through the piles and piles of photo albums she meticulously collected and kept.  I was enchanted by seeing my grandparents when they were young, my mom and uncle as children and black & white pictures of countless relatives I never chanced to meet.  After my grandparents passed, my mom, brother and I sat around her dining table and tried to go through all the photos.  We discovered a good many whose faces we didn’t recognize and surprisingly, my grandmother didn’t label.  Who were these people?  What had them meant to our grandparents?  In her encaustic mixed media work, New Jersey artist Marybeth Rothman takes vintage photo booth pictures without identity and puts new stories to old faces.

The artist gives new life to these abandoned portraits, seeing connections between strangers, reimagining them as icons of Greek mythology and fictional characters.  The tiny photographs are enlarged to a grand scale, giving even further importance to these forgotten faces.

It does make me wonder, what will become of all our own memories?  Especially now that most personal photos are digitized, there will no longer be boxes and albums of photographs to be unearthed.  Will living our lives digitally allow for a better keeping of record or will all be lost when the technology we’ve used becomes obsolete?

To see more work by Marybeth Rothman, please visit her website.

All images are via the artist’s website.