{"id":10023947,"date":"2026-04-15T12:15:06","date_gmt":"2026-04-15T11:15:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/replica\/"},"modified":"2026-04-15T12:48:08","modified_gmt":"2026-04-15T11:48:08","slug":"art-artist-eloise-hess-on-memory-impermanence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/art-artist-eloise-hess-on-memory-impermanence\/","title":{"rendered":"Afterimage"},"content":{"rendered":"

INTERVIEW Dzenana MUJADZIC<\/p>\n

The recent work of Los Angeles<\/a>\u2013based photographer Eloise Hess<\/a> revolves around memory, perception, and the fragility of holding on. Personal and intimate, it asks what an image can reveal when memory begins to falter\u2014and how photography<\/a>, between intention and chance, forms its own kind of truth.<\/p>\n

Chapter<\/em> In your series Second Hand<\/em> (2024) and Early Morning Tomorrow<\/em> (2025), you worked together with your father Charles Hess. What motivated you to explore that collaboration?<\/p>\n

Eloise Hess<\/em> My father has Early-Onset Alzheimer\u2019s. We\u2019re seven years since his diagnosis and longer since the onset of his symptoms. Early in the disease he carried this insistent yearning to photograph everything. This centered the question of photography\u2014why? As the disease progressed, he struggled to use the camera. He pointed the camera in the wrong direction, against his intention. When the photograph misses the photographer\u2019s intention, why then? The act superseded the outcome. We found ways to take photographs together, adapting the process as his abilities changed. In what became Second Hand<\/em>, I wound the film and helped him find the button on the camera, he pointed the camera and pressed the button. Sometimes he framed the picture with his hands, as if holding the camera, and I shot the picture he held. Then he could no longer find or press the button, nor hold the imagined camera in his hands. In what became Early Morning Tomorrow<\/em>, he held and pointed the camera in the direction he wanted to photograph, or in a direction unintended, and I shot the picture through his viewfinder. These are not necessarily the photographs he would have taken on his own, nor the photographs he intended to take. They\u2019re as determined by my aim as by the discomfort I felt in our two-person act. Our collaboration began when it felt called for, and ended when it was clear it should. In a wider sense it continues.<\/p>\n

\"Artwork
\u00a9 Mason Kuehler; Courtesy of von ammon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00bb2.27\u00ab, 2025 | Early Morning Tomorrow<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Artwork
\u00a9 Mason Kuehler; Courtesy of von ammon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00bb4.27\u00ab, 2025 | Early Morning Tomorrow<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Artwork
\u00a9 Mason Kuehler; Courtesy of von ammon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00bb19.27\u00ab, 2025 | Early Morning Tomorrow<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chapter<\/em> In this context, how has the experience of creating this work shaped the way you think about memory and impermanence\u2014themes often associated with age and reflection?<\/p>\n

Eloise Hess<\/em> The experience of this disease, alongside making this work, has taught me an enormous amount about the function of memory and the actuality of impermanence. As I\u2019ve seen, when memory fails, the sense of self begins to unravel. This can be wildly painful, and also profound. Memory helps us organize our experience as our experience exceeds our capacity to contain it. It helps us to stabilize the through-line that constitutes our sense of self. Photography can be used as a tool in this construction; it often is. We often take photographs to remember our experiences\u2014and we often remember best the ones that have been photographed. But a photograph is a cut, a limited kind of intake, a limited kind of output, cut from the whole. It can be used to close down memory, to align it with expectation\u2014or to open up memory, to imbue it with speculation. It is a cut of the actual\u2014made more permanent than the moment it records and the moments that surround it, yet just as partial as the moment it records and as permeable to the impressions upon it. I\u2019m interested in a photography that reckons with this position between persistence and instability, index and impressionability.<\/p>\n

\"Artwork
\u00a9 Mason Kuehler; Courtesy of von ammon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00bb21.27\u00ab, 2025 | Early Morning Tomorrow<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Artwork
\u00a9 Mason Kuehler; Courtesy of von ammon<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00bb23.27\u00ab, 2025 | Early Morning Tomorrow<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chapter <\/em> More generally, what place does vulnerability hold in your artistic practice?<\/p>\n

Eloise Hess <\/em> I\u2019m hesitant to use the word vulnerability, which comes from the word wound. I\u2019m concerned with receptivity. Receptivity includes vulnerability, at times. To maintain receptivity means to churn through and make form of whatever comes through, however it comes. There is what compels me to make and what compels me while making, a passive and active attunement. When I feel compelled to make, it\u2019s difficult not to try to resurrect just what compelled me to make initially, but while making, to be compelled again, differently than initially, to maintain responsiveness throughout.<\/p>\n

\"Artwork
\u00a9 Charles Benton; Courtesy of Chapter NY<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00bbSky Clad\u00ab, 2025 | Picture a Train<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Artwork
\u00a9 Charles Benton; Courtesy of Chapter NY<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00bbLedges\u00ab, 2025 | Picture a Train<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chapter<\/em> You describe your work as being about the act rather than the outcome, emerging from gestures rather than observations. From your perspective, what does the process of making reveal that you can\u2019t access through the finished image?<\/p>\n

Eloise Hess<\/em> I may have been speaking, as I said earlier, of the act of photographing superseding the outcome of the photograph. That was a lesson in that collaboration. But I don\u2019t mean to pose the act against the outcome, or the making against the finished work. The finished work holds the entire process of making it; the act is inseparable from the outcome. The process of making reveals lots of \u00bbnot it\u00ab that you can\u2019t access through the finished work because they\u2019re not in it. The \u00bbnot its\u00ab include the photographs I don\u2019t print, the prints I don\u2019t choose. I make dozens more prints per painting than are included in the finished painting, and sometimes scrape off and re-make the same painting on the same panel many times over. All the \u00bbnot its\u00ab help me find what it is. I spend much more time with the work in process than with the finished work. But a lot happens with the finished work beyond my making it. There is the process of the viewer, maybe many, whose experience I cannot know but which meets mine somewhere with the object.<\/p>\n

FIRST PUBLISHED IN CHAPTER \u2116XIII \u00bbIDENTITY\u00ab<\/a> \u2014 WINTER 2025\/26<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

INTERVIEW Dzenana MUJADZIC The recent work of Los Angeles\u2013based photographer Eloise Hess revolves around memory, perception, and the fragility of holding on. Personal and intimate, it asks what an image can reveal when memory begins to falter\u2014and how photography, between intention and chance, forms its own kind of truth. Chapter In your series Second Hand (2024) and Early Morning Tomorrow (2025), you worked together with your father Charles Hess. What motivated you to explore that collaboration? Eloise Hess My father […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":10023943,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[534,336,337],"tags":[358,346],"class_list":["post-10023947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art","category-articles","category-carousel","tag-kunst-en","tag-portfolio-en"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10023947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10023947"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10023947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10023951,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10023947\/revisions\/10023951"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10023943"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10023947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10023947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chapter.digital\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10023947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}