Strawberries with Milk
My grandfather’s country house is called “Strawberries” (in the Latvian countryside, traditionally houses have names, not numbers), and it is one of the reasons for titling this series “Strawberries with Milk.” The other reason is just as subjective: in my childhood memories, strawberries with milk on sweltering summer days were a delicious treat from my grandparents when I visited them in the country.
Initially, in 2008, I intended this series as a personal story about my parents and contemporary Latvia, and the main thought behind the work was the understanding that life is short and that my parents would sooner or later die. And I always had the feeling that I never truly understood them or our relationships. So the camera became, for me, a portal into their lives, which still remain much the same as they were when I was a small kid, almost 40 years ago. Yet, several years later, I realized that when I look at my parents through the lens of a camera, I am looking inside myself and confronting my fear of losing them. When photographing my parents, I explore their daily chores and leisure, but I also notice things I never wanted to see – how old and sometimes helpless they are. I discover people entirely different from the ones I imagined. To be frank, I am afraid of many of the photographs in this series because I see what I desperately do not want to see. I see my mother sleeping, exhausted, leaning against the wall as she climbs the stairs; I see her old smock. I see my father napping in front of the TV, etc. Until my father’s and mother’s sister died, they regularly visited grandfather’s country house – to help my mother’s sister, tend the garden and the bees, and kindle the stove for cooking... Most of their chores are the same as those people in the country did two centuries ago and even earlier. It seems that time stands still in the country and in their lives. Many of the works in the series reflect not only my parents’ everyday life but also the present-day environment in Latvia, weaving my parents’ daily life with the Latvian social landscape into a single story.
Now, almost 20 years later, after I started this series in which I portrayed parents and a few close relatives, only my mother is still alive, and the grandparents' house no longer exists. The works in this series materialize my fear – fear of death.
