Alzheimer’s and the Family

I grew up in the home of my grandfather, Nasser Mohammed, and was close to him throughout my childhood, receiving from him immense love and warmth. In the final years of his life, we discovered a new kind of closeness we had never experienced before.
This photographic series narrates the difficult and emotional journey we went through with Alzheimer’s disease, which gradually took away my grandfather’s memory and made him fixate on distant events from the past.

In 2019, we noticed that he had begun to live in a different time, speaking as if we were in the mid-1970s. During that period, he went through a deeply painful experience: the loss of his younger brother, who had been the closest person to him. That wound remained silent inside him until he suffered a stroke after the natural death of his older brother. From then on, he began to lose connection with the present—he saw my grandmother as his mother and could only recognize some relatives through old photographs.

The disease transforms memory into a drifting scene of longing and sorrow. Yet, there was still beauty in the religious rituals he performed silently in the place he had known all his life, though he no longer remembered it. He was insistent on returning to his old home, which had been demolished decades earlier and which, for him, held the joyful memories of youth.
Although I remained part of his fading memory, he no longer remembered me. This emotional loss adds depth to the project, as I explore not only his struggle with Alzheimer’s, but also my personal grief over the bond that once gave me strength and has now vanished.

I began documenting these moments as they are part of his disappearing memory, and also a part of my personal journey toward healing from family trauma. Through this emotional photographic series, I present the psychological struggles my grandfather endured—especially in the moments when I saw him more connected to his past than his present.

During this time, I had to learn how to communicate with him anew. In moments of confusion, when he looked at me without knowing who I was, I learned how to endure these painful instances. As his memory slowly disappeared, I found myself rediscovering our relationship in a new context—one built on a love that needed no mutual recognition.

Visual Approach

In this project, I adopted a collage-based visual approach, blending recent photographs with elements from the past to create scenes that reflect the overlap between the present and fading memories. I used a scanner to digitize old family photos and reframe them within the visual context of the project, allowing the images to act as windows into the time my grandfather now lived in.

Photography alone wasn’t enough to tell this story. I involved my grandmother in the project—she embroidered onto some of the photographs, adding her personal touch to express her deep emotional connection to my grandfather. Her embroidery became the threads linking past to present and symbolized her role in preserving his memories even as he began to lose them.

I also gave my grandfather some photos and asked him to write down what he remembered about the people or places in them. In some cases, the words flowed as if he were reliving the moment. In others, he couldn’t remember the faces and instead colored or smudged them—an attempt to visually express the void left by memory loss. These spontaneous alterations became part of the project, serving as tangible reflections of how he was interacting with a past that had grown hazy.

This visual method goes beyond documentation—it seeks to reconstruct memory through imagery, offering viewers a glimpse into the confusion and longing my grandfather experiences. In this way, the project becomes more than a collection of photographs; it evolves into an artwork that reflects the emotional and psychological transformations experienced by Alzheimer’s patients and their families.