Life & Reflection

Erosion — A Photo Series About Fading Away

Documenting the disappearing act of life.

My 80 year old father at the public pool where he learned to swim almost 70 years ago. Photograph by Ivan Melicoff Abril.

“Erosion” is a photographic series reflecting on how places, people, family and memories change only to fade away before our eyes. I began this project in November 2021 while attending my grandmother’s 100th birthday. My initial plan was to make a road-trip with my father through the old route he used to take in his youth as a merchant driver for my grandfather. At an early point during the trip we stopped at a river crossing where he had been stranded for 3 days eating only cinnamon cookies. That happened in 1962 and it became a fun family anecdote.

After a minute walking at the crossing, I noted two crosses near the edge of the road. A young couple had died there in 2004. The loving eulogy messages written on their crosses had a great impact on me. It dawned on me how territory changes in meaning: what had been a fun story about my father’s youth, was now a memorial. A place of deep grief and loss for others.

My father reads the loving eulogies written on the crosses of a young couple, Lupita and Dario. Photograph by Ivan Melicoff Abril.

I watched my 80 year old dad reading those crosses and for the first time the idea that he’ll one day be gone felt real in an almost tangible way. With that revelation lingering in my mind, we kept going. It made me reflect on the concepts of legacy, transcendence and if they even matter at all. Not like characters making it into the annals of history, but in a more immediate way: father to son. It made me realize what a small step in time a generation is. I thought of how my deceased grandparents had only been mentioned a few times over the last decade.

A short two day trip to a dusty town presented me with the disappearing act of life under the erosion of the sandpapers of time.

While being an exercise of thoughts on life, death and impermanence, this series is also an uncertain cry that screams “I’m here!”, in the hopes that maybe down the line when -if- someone ever stumbles on to it, an echo will say “This man was here.”