REIMAGING ERICA

BY SARAH SWEENEY

ASSISTED BY PARIS BAILLIE

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MICHAEL BENTLEY

Reimaging Erica is a digital archive constructed over one year using images of a woman found in the Creative Commons of Flickr. The images in the archive are edited and manipulated to isolate the body of Erica, concealing and excluding the bodies of her husband and children. This archive presents a new narrative of the female body through its amputations and deletions. In this archive we are simultaneously reimaging and reclaiming Erica’s body. She becomes visible in both the pieces of her body that remain and the pieces that she cedes to the people in her life. This project hinges on the radical act of reimagining one woman’s private life within public web spaces. On June 15th, 2017, eleven years after Erica’s husband, Michael Bentley, posted his first photograph, we will begin to post these new images to a photostream on Flickr and an Instagram feed titled Reimaging Erica.

https://reimagingerica.wordpress.com/

https://www.flickr.com/photos/reimagingerica

https://www.instagram.com/reimagingerica/

We received a Mellon Grant from the Tang Museum to continue developing the “Reimaging Erica” series through researching Joachim Schmid’s Archiv collection at the Tang. Our work is published in Tang Museum’s First Accelerate Publication.