Amanda Kung

Going back home during quarantine was the first time in a long time that my whole family had lived together under one roof–mother, father, sister, and me. Living in that house in the suburbs was at once both comforting and stifling; it was familiar, it was my childhood, it was unremarkable. I found it hard to create in this environment which felt very removed, far from the city and from my friends and instead returning to my role in the family as a child: being cooked for, cared for, performing household chores, arguing with my mother. These photographs document these seemingly mundane moments I shared with my family. Moments where voices and bodies overlap; cooking separate meals in the same space, tending to our herbs and vegetables in the backyard. Moments enshrined in black and white 35mm film, predetermined for me because I had left it there since graduating high school, a time when I still shot on black and white. This work exists out of necessity, out of the transient space I occupied within my own home for those few months where I had once been a comfortable inhabitant, and where I now felt like a guest. It is an exploration of personal relationships within family and what it means to be and feel at “home.”