photographs and their meanings.

In the beginning I took the photographs to

use as ‗linking objects‘ (Volkan), the way to connect with my father and extent
a reparatory relationship in means of a ‗continuing bond‘(Klass) and to trap
my emotions ‗in a kind of a stasis a time freeze‘(Volkan). I made a really
heavy emotional investment on those pictures, and that was the key in
unlocking my feeling of loss in them.

Berson decribes memory as ‗stored bodily actions‘. Accessing through the

body and ‗doing‘ the photography I accessed of all this coded prosthetic
memories and the performative processes involving them. I now understand
those photographs as ‗phatic objects‘, being of, relating to, or being speech
used to share feelings or to establish a mood of sociability rather than to
communicate information or ideas with which I could articulate finally my
visual bonded cultural ‗aphasia‘having to do with my autobiographical
memory..

The research method employed in this research is also auto ethnography with
co-constructed narratives and interactive viewing. Auto ethnography is
―research, writing, story and method that connects the autobiographical and
personal to the cultural social and political‖ ( Ellis 2004, page xix).

The reason I am so persistent about this research is because I strongly

believe that this research can be of real use to others as it has been to me.

Auto ethnography is defined as a ‗blend of ethnography and autobiographical

writing that incorporates elements of one's own life experience when writing
about others‘ (Scott-Hoy 2002), an autobiographic narrative that places the
self within a social context (Reed- Danahay 1997) Nevertheless auto
ethnography is ‗both a method and a text‘ (Etherington 2004). It is quite often
that creative languages such as photography are assimilated in auto
ethnographic research.

The element of self disclosure incorporated in auto ethnography is why the

research method has been previously characterized as ‗self-indulgent
solipsistic and narcissistic‘ Mykhalovskiy (1997). Nevertheless I am
enthusiastic about using it even though it involves a lot of risks because I
strongly believe that it can be of real use to others as it has been to me.
Campbell photographed her father‘s deterioration and death. She elaborates:
―I realized that I‗d joined the majority of humanity who knew the feeling of
great loss. This isn‘t something to keep quiet about‖. (Campbell 2011).
Likewise Church comments that to write experiences of vulnerability ‗as a
social science text is to socialize the experience and to help people
understand what it is that I have lived through.Its not just me, it is profoundly
social, it is common, it is always among us. And this is why the risk is so
important.‘ (quoted in Etherington 2004). Walkerdine clarifies of how self-