Artwork

Allison Gretchko is an American photographer and writer born in Chicago and based in London. Primarily shooting on 35mm film, Allison's photographs draw on her personal archive, inheritance and familial memories through which she processes and revisits her past, while reflecting on collective experiences of temporality and loss. Focusing on the poetic fragments of the everyday, such as serene domestic scenes and atmospheric still lifes, her work speaks to fleeting moments we hold onto and fictionalise through memory. “I’m inspired by the duality that exists in how people interact, relate to, or remember one another, and the fluidity of memories and image-making as sources of distorted truth,” she explains.

Having worked as a successful commercial photographer for ten years, Allison left her career in Los Angeles amidst the pandemic to pursue her own creative vision. She earned an MA in Photography and later an MFA in Arts & Humanities, both from the Royal College of Art. Since graduating, she has been shortlisted for New Blood Art’s Emerging Art Prize and exhibited her graduate work at the Affordable Art Fair. With a BSc in Sociology from Skidmore College preceding her photography career, Allison's practice is strongly rooted in the social aspects of life–relationships, places and our connections to them. “My work is definitely influenced by my background in sociology; I’m fascinated by how people–or their absence–impact their environment, ecology and others through the traces they leave behind, and what that then can look like for a future society to inherit"

While the main subjects of Allison's early photographs were people, she describes her latest body of work Who drinks your tears? as her “first series focusing on the lack of presence.” Imbued with a nostalgic quality, the warm and grainy domestic scenes are set in Allison’s generational family home in Ontario, Canada, passed down from her great-grandmother to her grandmother, and eventually to her. “For me, the series is about capturing the presence of people in their physical absence; through the objects they have purchased and placed in a certain way or the dust marks they have left behind, and what that might reveal about them.” Guided only by the movement of light, her images expose details that would otherwise go undetected but are made visible by contrast. “All my work stems from psychogeography. I wander to see what sparks my eyes rather than staging scenes, even if they feel conceptualised at times. I capture what I find, not try to construct a different world through my images.”

Echoed in Allison’s photographs is also the impressionistic and ephemeral nature of memory, how seemingly mundane scenes–like the shadow of a window frame cast onto the wood panelling, or a cobweb irradiated by a beam of sunlight–are etched onto the mind’s eye while others fade. Memory in her photographs however is not purely nostalgic but confronting and intrusive at times, for both the viewer and the maker: “The images have a darker undertone, looking at how our past can also consume us. Is inheritance truly caring, or is it haunting, depleting us in emotional, mental and physical ways?” Intended to be installed at eye level, like windows and doors, the images invite the viewer’s gaze in, guiding them through the house and the recesses of Allison’s private memory while prompting them to reflect upon their own.

Allison is currently building on the next chapters of Who drinks your tears?, incorporating new images of the ecology and creatures living around the house, alongside fragments of her writing practice into the series. “Writing has always been part of my process but I’ve never made it public. I’m now experimenting with writing out my memories of the house, writing into the house, and making the house write back to me, as if it were a being.”