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A photographer chases her genetic code around the globe

A photographer chases her genetic code around the globe

Iam the eldest of five brothers and sisters. My sixteen-year-old sister, like me, now lives in Paris; my nineteen-year-old sister and twentyyear-old brother live in Port-au-prince; and my thirty-year-old sister lives in New York (though, despite my attempts, we’ve never met). The five of us are related, yet we are not a family — I didn’t even know that they existed for nearly two decades. This is because my father had five children with four different women. For a long time, my father, who is Haitian, was a stranger to me. I had spent half of my life in Africa, the other in Canada, and I only met him after I turned eighteen. I was twenty-five the second time that we saw each other. When I was growing up, I hated my father for his failures, for his inability to be a parent to my newly known siblings and me. Though, somehow, it was his absence that made him more omnipresent than any other person in my life. I tended to blame him for everything that I disliked in myself, yet I could recognize myself in him. Having spent very little time with my father, I know that his traits and behaviours I mirror are not due to shared experiences but due to shared genes. In this project, DNA is drawing a portrait of me through my relatives. Creating my own family album is my way of reconciling the past and forging a bond between the members of my family despite their distances. There is my half-sister and me, as well as my mother and my sister’s mother, both pregnant from the same man eighteen years apart. There are my two grandmothers and grandfathers, both the black Haitians and the white Canadians. There is my father and my mother, who I have seen together only once in my life. Another collage shows my father and me — we have never had our picture taken together. These images are only the beginning. In 2017, I did a DNA test and have now contacted 1,224 people who are related to me—all strangers who share part of my genetic makeup. I plan to do two more tests: one that traces African descent and another from a company based out of the United States. My goal is to create a much larger family portrait. I want to show that, despite great distances, we are all related in one way or another.

untitled, 2017 This is the wedding portrait that my parents never had. It’s a combination of my two families. Having grown up with a constant wonder about my identity, I feel a sense of belonging in putting everyone together: black and white and mixed, bourgeois and working class, my Metallicaloving cousin alongside my great-grandfather from Saint Thomas. I firmly believe that, through my dna, I am able to depict the contemporary face of our societies.