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Four Sisters Lovingly Recreate Their Childhood Photographs

More than 20 years after the originals were snapped by her father, photographer Wilma Hurskainen gathered her three sisters to reconstruct and re-photograph their childhood's keepsake photos. The beautiful results are incredibly poignant.

I have always been very attracted by the photograph´s ability to cross time and create this kind of comparisons. There is something sad, almost tragic, about looking at old photographs compared to new ones and seeing how people and things have changed or grown up. After all, it is said that time has been accepted as a common means of measuring life because people are not able nor willing to see the change in themselves. In the pictures it seems as if we were trying to go back to our childhood by adopting the same position towards each other and the photographer´s/spectator´s gaze but we unavoidably fail. We have to fail – there is no return in time.
In the comparisons time takes a strange form – it feels as if there was a dialogue between the past and the present moment, like there is in our minds as concerns our own memories A memory is never static, permanent, but changes as we change. By repeating a distant moment something weird is revealed about us as objects of the photograph in the first pictures: the way we play our artificial roles for the photograph. We might not be more than 5 years old, but we already know exactly how to be in/for a photograph. I would love to repeat the process with my sisters in another 10-15 years. But I have to accept that a part of both growth and life is their unpredictability.