Dor by Mary Baldo

“Dor is extracted from a photographic archive that I have been building up since the birth of my children. Over the past fourteen years I have photographed my family’s daily life. It is more than 40,000 images sorted and classified into 150 albums, one per month, that systematically document, day after day, year after year, the metamorphosis of my children and my own as a woman going through motherhood and the home experience. This archive is both expansive and private. In order to show these images, perhaps to be able to look at them, I had to turn them away.
Thus, I systematized a habit of re-photographing my own photographs and other documents. I use it to archive all sorts of images, identity photos, Polaroids, photos belonging to friends and relatives, but also drawings, notes, etc. This practice of photographic reproduction has become Dor’s processing method.
The original photographs have been taken between 2012 and 2020. They were all re- photographed in 2021 for this book. Each image therefore has two shooting dates, two temporalities, refers to two distinct photographic ‘moments’. I believe they even have two authors.
The subject of this book are photographic prints, paper pictures. The superposition of the photographic gesture across time has led me to reinterpret my own gaze, sometimes imperceptibly, sometimes in more emphatic operations, playing with shadows, making delicate or wild croppings, zooming in on micro details.
The title, Dor, is a Romanian word meaning a feeling that combines love and loneliness, desire and pain, attachment and detachment. In the mise en abyme of the family archives, Dor tells the story of a photographic obsession, the story of a changing gaze, of the need for detachment, of the childhood so brief, and, in the background, I believe, the anticipated nostalgia of the loss of my eyesight.”