Yeshe McKenna
Portfolio / About / Projects
Summary;
This body of work is drawn from a personal family archive of photographs taken in New York City during the late 1990s and early 2000s.
The project explores the transformative experience of migrating across the world and falling in love with a new city, how such movement can
shape identity, creative vision, and emotional life. Through these images, McKenna reflects on living boldly and expansively, embracing a life too complex to be contained by a single
narrative. The photographs move through joy, romance, fear, and death, offering an intimate glimpse into a lived world defined by intensity, vulnerability and connection.
Research;
The work is informed by a lineage of New York based artists whose practices were rooted in lived experience and emotional truth. Central to this research is the
influence of Nan Goldin, whose radically honest photographic language reshaped contemporary documentary practice.
Goldin’s commitment to recording life as it unfolded without
staging, manipulation, or aesthetic distance established a model of photography as personal testimony. This approach underpins McKenna’s understanding of the archive not as nostalgia,
but as a living record shaped by intimacy, proximity and trust.
Context;
McKenna’s uncle, John Marchant, was a close friend and longtime studio manager to Nan Goldin in both New York and Paris. Many of the photographs presented were taken by Marchant
and depict figures who also appear in Goldin’s work. Through this family connection, McKenna has access to previously unseen images from Goldin’s extended
circle and includes an original work by Goldin in the project. McKenna also lived in Goldin’s former live-work space at 334 Bowery, a site where many photographs from
The Ballad of Sexual Dependency were made. Revealing striking parallels in subject matter: chosen family, love, addiction, survival and emotional truth. All works are shown with full consent.
Process;
The photographs were preserved on 35mm slide film and remained unseen for over twenty years. McKenna carefully revisited the archive using a Kodak slide projector,
selecting and editing the images into a slideshow. This process honours the materiality of the medium and underscores the importance of preserving memory as evidence,
an act of witnessing that connects personal history to a broader photographic legacy.