My mother had shown me an old postcard featuring a photo of the central square in Opatów, the small Polish town where she was born. The square was tranquil, a place where children played, women gossiped, and ghosts stayed underground.

We located the building where my mother’s family had lived. The entrance to the courtyard was through a dilapidated brick archway and as we approached I felt a cool dampness, as if a transparent presence moved with us through the air. Once inside, my mother stopped; things grew uncomfortably quiet. She turned around, and as she absorbed this neglected world and allowed her memory to open, I began to feel light-headed, caught up in the circle of her confusion.

She began to speak, and as she described her aunts on their hands and knees, scrubbing the now-rotting steps leading to the second floor, it felt like her persona altered, transformed by the kind of fleeting memory that leaves before it fully arrives. Suddenly she was grasping for words. With no vegetation in site and just a few cracked tiles covered by the sooty evidence of where the coal was stored, the courtyard felt like a haunted place. I asked her to stay in the center of the courtyard as I started shooting. She became riveted to the spot, seemingly unaware of me.

Moving closer with my camera, I watched a great sorrow come across her face; she bit her lower lip and began to cry. Rather than consoling her I photographed the moment, burying my sense of duty as her son in a split-second of selfishness, silently welcoming the raw emotion. Watching my mother wrestle with her memories seemed to suck the air from my lungs. The camera was all that held me in place.

When I look at these photos of her, visibly shaken in that dismal place, I imagine her as a girl of three, naïvely unaware of the cataclysmic events stretching out before her, playing and whispering and secure in her tiny universe. Undoubtedly that world had spun in a slower way, filled with promise and sweet noise.