Jack’s Mountain, 2019
Black & white 35 mm film
Jack’s Mountain documents a three-week-long trip my mom, brother and I took in June of 2019 to the island of Corsica. In the 1970s my dad’s family purchased a house on the southernmost tip of the island. The house has been a gathering place for the extended family for decades and it is where I’ve spent many summers as a child. Three miles northwest of our home lies the port town of Bonifacio and two miles from there the Mont de la Trinité—or as we called it, Jack’s Mountain. Driving along the winding roads into town, my dad would lift his hand from the wheel of my grammy’s green Kangoo and point to the mountain rising into view. “It’s Jack taking a sieste,” he’d say. The Mont de la Trinité bears a remarkable resemblance to my grandpa Jack’s sleeping silhouette. When Jack died in 2001, my dad’s family brought his ashes to the Ermitage de la Trinité, an old monastery built on top of the mountain. There, at what would be the tip of Jack’s nose, they spread his ashes. When my grammy passed away seventeen years later they spread her ashes there too. And before my dad died in 2016 from cancer, he asked that he be brought to the top of the mountain. On June 6, 2019 my mom, brother and I took my dad’s ashes to the top of Jack’s Mountain. Many of the photographs seen here are of that day.