Ally Winn

Colors of my Childhood

Every one of us has lived through various experiences throughout our childhood, and this includes traumatic ones. Throughout my life, I realized I have desensitized myself and normalized my childhood trauma in day-to-day conversations, and now that I am older, I realize that the things my siblings and I have gone through weren’t normal at all. This nostalgia is troublesome. I have this intense longing to go back to my childhood for the chance to spend time with my older sister before her death and my brother before his addiction, yet on the other hand I never want to think about my childhood due to the trauma that my mother put us through. It’s this constant toss and turn between wanting to remember and wanting to forget. Colors of my Childhood is an experimental project dedicated to addressing my childhood traumas in a more accurate narrative, by manipulating and re-colorizing 10 scanned childhood negatives. Each color used in these photos represents a memory with that person, good and bad, and I encourage you to find your own meanings behind these colors. Even though these experiences shouldn’t be normalized, I am hoping that Colors of my Childhood encourages its viewers to normalize talking about traumas in order to heal and gain closure from them.