Some images in the series are black and white, some coloured by hand and some yellowed by time. We understand from this and numerous other details that the photographs date from different periods, and from their amateurish snapshot aesthetic that they all form part of a family album featuring the same people in different situations and stages in their lives. Another constant presence is the figure of a slim young woman with long black hair, upon whom time seems to leave no trace.
Moira Ricci delves into the photographs of the past following the tracks of her mother, whose dates of birth and death provide the series with its title and indicate the time span covered by the images. Digital processing of old family photographs enables the artist to appear beside and observe her mother while remaining an extraneous figure, a sort of ubiquitous ghost hovering on the edges of the images and events.
It is not, however, in response to retrospective needs that Ricci addresses these photographs of the past. She looks at reality in an attempt to overcome its spatiotemporal dimension by meeting her mother virtually in various moments of her life before her sudden death. Digital image manipulation serves the artist to eliminate temporal distance and use the photographs of her “family chronicles” to consider her mother’s past and her own present and origins at the same time.
Moira Ricci takes the intimate, family photographs lodged in the memory of every individual as the subject of her work. As the social psychologist Harald Welzer points out in his Theorie der Erinnerung (Theory of Memory), while these shots can sometimes come to replace our memories of situations we actually experienced, others taken in our absence remain alive and fixed in our memory as though we had really been present on the occasion shown.

Moira Ricci (Italia, 1977)

The photographic series 20.12.53 – 10.08.04, which appears to have been born out of the artist’s desire to revisit her personal history, perfectly embodies the views put forward by Roland Barthes in his celebrated Camera Lucida: photography endows the past with a certainty so solid as to be equivalent to the present, thus blurring the boundary between reality (what was) and truth.