Thanks, Gd documents the experience of my Granddad during the later stages of dementia. This project combines archival and contemporary photographs with excerpts from handwritten notes he made over 8 years during his memory decline.

I took the contemporary photographs using my Granddad’s Nikkormat EL from the 1970s as a way of “collaborating” with him, even though he was unable to actively participate in the process. The experience of shooting with film, rather than on digital, was integral to the process, because the unpredictability of film mimicked the unreliability of memory.

I aim for this photobook to be valued as both an art object and a tool to promote empathy for people who have dementia. This is a fitting outcome of this work, because my Granddad worked as a GP for 45 years and had a lifelong passion for photography.

The dummy edition (pictured here) was produced during the Make a Photobook Workshop with Read That Image in Dublin, with funding from the Rebecca Vassie Trust. Grants from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, The National Lottery, and the HSC R&D Division of the Public Health Agency funded research piloting this photobook in nursing education at Queen’s University Belfast School of Nursing and Midwifery.

This project informed an essay I wrote about dignity in dementia care and in photography of ill health. This essay was commissioned by and published in The Lancet, Volume 400, Issue 10348. A photograph from this series was also published in The Lancet, Volume 394, Issue 10216. This project further informed an article I wrote for World Press Photo’s Witness platform, The Ethics of Documenting Your Own Family. Peer-reviewed research about the implementation of the photobook in nursing education was published in BMC Nursing in 2022.

This photobook was featured in the 2022 Dublin Art Book Fair.