Allison Gretchko
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11
- 7 min read
Allison Gretchko is a Chicago-born photographer and writer based in London. She works with analogue photography, often returning to the same rooms and objects over time. Her work looks at how memory stays in spaces, influencing how we see and remember them. Many of her projects start with family histories, developing into shared stories. Her work centers on home interiors and the marks people leave behind. In series such as “Parental Guidance” and “Who Drinks Your Tears?” she returns to these spaces, capturing how time changes them.
Q: You often work with memory and family history. What made you start turning those themes into images?
A: Beginning my photography practice initially as a teenager, I photographed what I had access to and that turned out to be my parents. Later turning into my long-term project “Parental Guidance.” To this day, I am still adding in new portraits every year, examining our relationship through how they meet or how, more often than not, they avoid my gaze. Understanding intimate relationships is important to my practice from a sociological and emotional standpoint and in recent years I began to expand that under the notion of the archive of inheritance. I wanted to not only understand my own identity and all the factors that contributed to my personal formation based on the family I was raised in, but to document and contribute to that archive all of the collective feelings and memories of the past that are unseen traces of connection, care, and consumption. Memories have this incredible power to serve as a comfort, but if you stay in the past too long they can consume you. Turning those themes into images was a way to look at the universality of family history and the ecosystems of domesticity as archives of both the caring nature and haunting powers of the past. I was very careful in making sure that in my latest series, “Who drinks your tears?,” there were no personal indicators of my identity in my examination of a generational family home in order to speak to the larger experiences that everyone has when they look back on spaces they existed in during adolescence. It was about exploring the materiality of collective spatial and temporal memories surrounding the domestic that can be found in any home, no matter the occupants.
Q: Light seems to have its own role in your process. How do you decide when to let it take over?
A: As a practitioner of analogue photography, light is always important to my practice, but I view it as a type of collaborator in my practice and try to capture light as its own sense of embodiment.
In many ways, my work is based on intuitive wandering and I am directed by where the light happens to fall as it moves around a space throughout the day. To me it defines what is destined to be seen or uncovered. I never stage any of my photographs and allow where the light falls to create the composition and content, using it as an investigative tool of discovery to better understand a place, a person, or a trace of the past. In addition to light's ability to showcase and highlight the world around us, light also holds the power to burn, whether that’s our skin or transferring the negative into a photographic positive on paper, and burning symbolizes destruction and mark-making. There is both a sense of comfort and a sense of chaos associated with light, similar to memories, that I want to play with in my work, so it greatly informs the process and takes over the outcome of my images in order to emphasize the different ways it can embody emotions or traces.
Q: In “Who drinks your tears?,” there’s both warmth and unease. What does that mix mean to you?
A: The mix of warmth and unease is a duality that my work explores as it examines how light, memory, and the photographic image exist as sources of fictionalized reality.
There is a sense of distortion in the documentative truth of a photographic image, similar to the distortion of remembrance, of not only an individual’s memory, but a collective one associated with space, place, or specific time periods. I wanted to explore those themes in a domestic space to examine how the feeling of warmth and care is easily mixed with the unease and haunting of a private sphere. Never really knowing what happens for anyone behind closed doors and the paradox of a home as being a safe haven for some or a prison of the past for others. The interiors of a house always have complex emotional ties and I wanted that conflict to be apparent and relatable for the viewer, leaving questions unanswered and open to interpretation depending on how they associate empty domestic scenes.
Q: You move between writing and photography. How do those two sides influence each other?
A: Oftentimes the way they work together is I write, then photograph, then write, then photograph. However, since my process is all analogous, the cycle of switching between the two mediums will continue despite not having ever developed the film or been able to see the negatives. So oftentimes, it’s influenced by the feelings and remembrances encountered along the way that then develops into a stream of consciousness thread of making.
I function on a loop rotating between the two, but since I can't see the images, I also don’t read or edit any of the writings. I try to maintain a flow state and then only later do I look and read what I have created and edit them so they are coherent together. This allows me to step inside the moment both physically, mentally, and emotionally that I am trying to process and produce for the public. My writing is usually fragmented poetry that sits within non-narrative autofiction, influenced by what I felt when photographing or the memories that the act of moving and documenting a space or person conjured in me, not only relating to my own history but also what moments of vulnerability in terms of care and consumption are universal to others in those moments. How relationships are always unique to the people in them or the space they exist in, but also speak to how common we all are to each other in our similarities. My photographs and poems work in conjunction with one another to explore the depths of memory, intimacy, and the imagined truth we all experience.
Q: Your work blurs what’s real and what’s imagined. How do you know when an image feels true enough?
A: All of my images feel true because of the process in which they were made, which is in fact authentic to the scene and to the negative. No image of mine is ever staged or set up or manipulated. I do not direct people or move objects into the glow of natural light. I construct my image compositions as I find them existing naturally in the world, so in their authenticity of documentation they are as true as they can be. It is important to only be an observer within my process, to find scenes that most people would overlook on their own and share them with a larger audience. However, it is not important for the viewer to understand that all of my images are real, as I am fascinated by the complexity of a photograph as a source of fictionalized reality. I want my viewer to question if it is real or imagined. To wonder if it could all be real because I include images that definitely don’t feel real. For instance, the image “Bag” appears to be staged, but in reality that is how I found it.
To this day, I could not tell you what was inside that bag or who placed it there or how long it had been sitting on the table. I entered the house and it was placed there already, right in the path of sunlight, but the questions it raises are what bring about notions of imagination. The viewer is meant to wonder, to question, to imagine what is real or isn’t. Existing in that in-between state is meant not only for the viewer to question the factual reality of a photograph but leave the photographic image open to people’s own experiences and imaginations. To allow them the poetry that can come out of daydreaming and wondering about everything you see or don't see in the photograph. I want an image to be true and authentic in its nature, but I want it to not be so true that it only speaks to my experience or knowledge. There has to be a common ground in a photograph that everyone can step into to appreciate and that means that there must exist notions of the imagined.
Q: Coming from a commercial background, what feels most different when you’re working on your personal projects?
A: My previous commercial background is entirely different from how I operate as an artist and fine art photographer now. The methods, tools, and outcomes are the complete opposite.
My personal projects are about exploring the ecosystems that exist within intimate relationships of people and of places. It’s about uncovering what’s hidden or unseen and turning those private feelings or connections into public discussions. It’s about the traces of what we remember and how that is what ultimately shapes us as human beings. My fine art projects are for society to question how we discuss moments of the past, both on a social and personal level. It’s about looking past how I use the tools of my medium to reach an outcome and more about creating something bigger that I hope speaks to people. My personal projects come from a vulnerability inside of me that wants to create larger connections with those around me and wants to explore all the deeper feelings I have in terms of viewing the world around me.
