Joseph & Grace
My Grandfather & Grandmother
Working title:
All of life is a foreign country.
[Quote by Jack Kerouac]
[Quote by Jack Kerouac]
'Welcome Home.'
I've longed to hear those words for all of my life. They're used by immigration officers to greet American citizens re-entering the country. Despite holding dual-nationality and identifying myself as an American, I've never visited the USA. To complicate matters further, for most of my life I believed an elaborate fiction about my family history – and more specifically, my Grandfather, Joseph O'Donnell.
I never met Joe. Although, I believed that I knew him. I spent my evenings as a child dreaming up romantic and exaggerated memories of his life in America. The hints of truth that existed of his story became warped by Hollywood movies, American TV and pretty much the whole proliferation of USA culture in Britain.
I believed that Joe had formed a Jazz band in his twenties, a band that had become semi-successful – signing a record contract and touring the continent. I believed that Joe met my Grandmother, Grace in Boston at one of their gigs; instantly falling in love. I believed that they settled down in Massachusetts where my Mother was born. I believed that Joe became frustrated with marital life, turning to alcohol before leaving the family for a life on the road. I believed that this decision was his downfall, that he had not been as successful in this second attempt, no one cared for his music anymore. I believed that he moved to Las Vegas, his life ending because of his love for liquor.
Except, in 2012 I stopped believing most of this. I felt that Joe's story needed to be told, that I needed to find myself and my position within the country, so I began researching for the trip. My first call was to Grace, to nail down the locations of the various Jazz bars he had played across the country, to find out where he hung around in Boston and to find out where he was buried in Las Vegas. I was incredibly surprised to find out that the majority of my story was false.
Joe's real story begins in a similar way. He formed a Jazz band in his late teens, playing gigs around Boston. His band had been on the cusp of signing a contract with label EMI when a horrific accident occurred. Joe was shot in the neck. I don't know the details of what exactly happened yet, but fortunately he survived – but he could no longer sing. He turned to mechanics instead, becoming an engineer and later meeting Grace when she moved to Boston from Ireland. They settled down and my Mother was born. A few years on, he formed an alcohol dependency and met another woman. They moved to Seattle and became distanced from my family; Grace and my Mother moved back to Ireland. At this point, i'm still discovering new aspects to the true story and a lot of it is still incredibly vague. He died in the early 90s, but my family does not know the cause of death nor where he was laid to rest.
I'm unsure how I formed a fantasy so distant from the truth, but I imagine it's from a mixture of my Mother's heroic view of her Father and the influence of American ideals through British media.
On the 18th August 2015, I will finally make the trip to the states that I have been dreaming of since I was young. I will be flying to Boston before driving through the cities that are significant to my myth of Joe (New York, Chicago, Las Vegas, LA and San Francisco) before ending the journey in Seattle. My idea is that I will be starting my trip in the city that birthed my family – the truth and the fiction. I will then be looking at the tension between American dreams and realities as I make my roadtrip to Seattle, where I hope to make my conclusions of what the USA is to me. I hope to find where my Grandfather is laid to rest and discover the true end of the story.
Practically, the project will be a series of photographs. I will be looking to meet people from all walks of life as I cross the continent. I'll be looking to talk to them about their experience of what America is, seeing how it relates to my understanding of it from across the sea. I will also be making a video diary, documenting my changing feelings and experiences that I will no doubt have along the way.