Like a Hole in the Heart: Brides, Battlefields, & Betrayal explores the tenuous intersection of love, desire, grief, and memory through the lens of vernacular photography. These works are built from found photographs: anonymous portraits, family snapshots, and images once held in private hands. Mundane and often forgotten, such photographs carry the intimate weight of personal histories, yet their narrative has shifted over time, becoming shadows of a lost past.

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Since its inception, photography has been central to rituals of mourning and remembrance. In the late 19th to early 20th century, it was common for photographers to create memorial motifs by superimposing or collaging the image of the deceased onto another photograph, often of funeral flowers or even the casket itself. These composite images acted as mementos, providing a visual form to aid in the grieving process. They bridged the gap between presence and absence, offering comfort in the face of often devastating loss.

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My work references this memorial tradition but expands and reinvents the narrative, much like a “memory retablo”. Through cutting, burning, and layering, photographs are fractured, creating ruptures that reflect the instability of relationships, memory, and the human condition. The bride emerges as a figure of tradition and old-world values: a symbol of vows, marriage, expectations, and commitments that are often broken or left unfulfilled. In contrast, battlefields are not literal landscapes of war but symbolic spaces of inner conflict, treacherous emotional terrains where love, loss, and memory collide.

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In some images, the eyes of figures are obscured, not to deny their presence, but to evoke the way memory operates: like a dream, blurred and incomplete, never entirely accurate. What remains are fragments: the soft curve of a neck, the glint of jewelry, the trace of painted lips. These details become heightened, markers of longing and desire. Lipstick and ornate necklaces speak to glamour and allure, as traces of beauty rituals that signal intimacy, attraction, and the hope of being remembered as desirable.

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This emphasis on adornment stands in stark contrast to the environments these figures inhabit. Set against backdrops that are industrial, barren, scorched, scarred, or emptied of life, luminous faces break through. They are soft, glamorous, and fragile in fields of despair. The tension between the ornamental and the ruined, the beautiful and the desolate, rests in conflict. It is within this breach that desire and memory intertwine: figures suspended between reverence and ruin, between what is cherished and what has already been lost.

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While period memorial photographs sought to restore a sense of wholeness, my interventions focus instead on fragmentation. The literal holes in these images become portals for longing, grief, and the void left by disrupted relationships and unfulfilled desires. By referencing vernacular and memorial photographic practices, these works ask us to reconsider the importance of everyday images. They are not neutral records but active agents in shaping how we remember, desire, and mourn. In their altered forms, these photographs reveal the precarious nature of love and memory, and the scars of broken promises, a hole in the heart that cannot be fully mended.

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-Anthony Vizzari, 2025.