Catherine Panebianco
Catherine Panebianco, who was born in Canada, currently lives in Jamestown, NY. Her work revolves around family, memory and the spirits that surround us. Her monograph, Holding Time, was published by Yoffy Press in March 2021, and is included in the collections of the George Eastman Library and the Museum of Modern Art Library. Panebianco received the 2020 LensCulture Critics Choice Top Ten Award, 2020 Center’s Project Launch Award and was a 2019 Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 50, and a 2020, 2016 and 2022 Critical Mass Finalist. She was a semi-finalist for the 2021 National Portrait Gallery’s Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. Her work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally including the BBA Photographic Prize in Germany, and Imago Lisboa Photo Festival in Portugal. Her work has also been featured in numerous publications including in The Guardian, Oxford American, D Magazine La Repubblica, and Lenscratch.
No Memory is Ever Alone
(Nessun ricordo è mai solo)
No Memory is Ever Alone is a love story about family. Weddings, road trips, babies, vacations, game nights – these everyday snapshots provide a roadmap to a life. By using my dad’s Kodak slides taken in the 1950s and 60s and physically holding them in my current landscape, I literally melded my past with my present.
No Memory is Ever Alone came about because every Christmas, my dad brought out a box of slides that he photographed in his late teens and early 20s and made us view them on an old projector (that if you left the slides in it too long, they would melt. All our visiting relatives would be required to tell stories about the slides – each year, the tales became a little more exaggerated. It was a consistent memory from a childhood where we moved a lot. The annual tradition made every place we landed, a home.
A lot of his slides are of my mom, they were together almost 60 years. She passed away a few years ago and I feel like her spirit, and all the spirits of our past, constantly surround us. These little vignettes of family life in my current “space” comforts me that she and others are still near, watching over me. You are always carrying your past in your present.
Catherine Panebianco