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My series “Friends and Family” explores how and what people see when they look at traditional family photos. I start with either current or old photos and use various techniques to alter them. I want to express the notion that people often project their own feelings, memories, and associations onto these kinds of photos.

By combining another image with the family photo – both altered with photo editing software –and then applying pastels and acrylics to the printed image, I make the original photos more universal and open to varying interpretations.

In “Fred’s Family,” I started with a photo of my husband with his cousins and grandparents when he was three years old and superimposed a photo I took of dried grass – both to distort the image and to represent the heat of summer, when the family photo was taken.

Gerard Buulong

gbuulong@gmail.com