Almost every photo I have of myself as a child is extremely blurred. My mother couldn’t take a picture without flinching. The camera was a Kodak Instamatic that used tiny little film cartridges so the quality of the image was never going to be stellar. Still, her snapshot technique was bafflingly poor.

In some ways the photos mirror my childhood recollections and now, more frighteningly, hers. The rosy haze of my youth comes to me through several thicknesses of plate glass.   Faces and objects in my mother’s brain are smearing into obscurity. The sense of time and place. The focus adjustment (nonexistant on the Instamatic) is sliding farther and farther towards the point where there is nothing but a haze of light through the viewfinder. Indistinct.

I look at the pictures with a strange sense of unease. Almost horror.