Linda Foard Roberts: Lament

Through contemporary photographs, historical essays, personal stories, and critical quotes, Linda Foard Roberts: Lament, a song of sorrow for those not heard, connects the tangibility of history and the geography of memory, an effort towards greater understanding of the palpable presence of our shared past in everyday life.

Markers of the past exist all around us, sometimes disguised, but always detectable, and Roberts sees her photographic efforts as a contribution to the ongoing legacy of truth-seeking, as well as philosophical inquiries into life, death, and basic human rights and excavations of the silent stories encoded in our surroundings.

For this project, Roberts employed an 8-x-10-inch view camera with a Darlot brass barrel lens from the Civil War era and nineteenth-century photographic techniques. This use of historic technology invokes the temporal merging that she seeks to capture in her work—the overlays of evidence of our past and present.