Human memory is a puzzling mechanism full of unpredictability and intrigue. It can play tricks on people, substituting real events with reconstructed or altered images. Photographs serve as a lasting embodiment of memories, but the distance between the objective record of a past moment and a person’s internal recollection may widen with time. This is exactly the process that William Josephs Radford explores in his Transparent project, the final chapter in a five-project series dedicated to mourning his father’s death in 2024.
Radford’s Mourning Art Cycle
Radford initiated a series of art projects to make sense of his father’s death, starting with the White Knight project, created using a Vaseline-covered lens as a metaphor for the fading memory of an elderly person. The second project, Gradient Loss, was shot in black and white to explore the existential nature of depression. The third, Residual Noise, pushed the camera’s resolution to extremes to deconstruct memory and explore its tiniest fragments. The fourth stage was Mourning Routine, in which Radford took early-morning photographs of the sky from his apartment window.
Transparent: An AI-Powered Experiment
Transparent is presented this September as the closing project of William Josephs Radford’s mourning cycle. Created using Photoshop and AI, the series features lenticular prints that capture presence and absence within a single artwork. It is deeply philosophical, interrogating the arbitrariness of what memory preserves and what it lets go of with the passage of time.
The effect of the father’s presence in the photographs, followed by his disappearance with the slightest movement of a hand, invites viewers to consider whether a person can disappear completely after death. The project also explores the broader practice of removing people from photographs and historical records for emotional or political purposes, including the systematic erasure that took place during Stalin’s repressions in the USSR.
This project resonates with related works by other artists, including Diana Markosian’s Father and Jon Uriarte’s Album, both of which question the reliability of photographic memory and records. In this context, Transparent adds another perspective to contemporary artistic explorations of disappearance, memory, and mortality.
About William Josephs Radford
William Josephs Radford is a contemporary British-Spanish artist working in experimental photography. Born in rural Andalucía to British parents, he grew up at the intersection of different cultures, which shaped his worldview and identity. Radford’s photography often explores provocative and unconventional subjects, with a particular interest in symbolism, spirituality, memory, and personal experience.