What Shadows Remember is an ongoing photographic investigation into inherited beliefs of protection, carried through family memory, archival photographs, and the disappearance of a personal object.

In my childhood, my father would return again and again to a story about a small red notebook that once belonged to my grandfather. Inside were handwritten Latin prayers, each one believed to offer a different form of protection. The notebook existed somewhere between Catholic devotion and vernacular belief, carrying equal measures of faith and fear. There was always one detail he never forgot: the final page held a drawing of a faceless figure. Years after my father’s death, I found the notebook exactly as he had described it. When I saw the drawing myself, I felt the same unease he once carried in his voice. I hid the notebook. I have never been able to find it again.

Its disappearance became the quiet beginning of this work. Instead of searching for what was lost, I began following what remained. I returned to my grandfather’s archive and found family photographs where the notebook appears almost by accident—not as the subject of the image, but as a small, overlooked presence within ordinary domestic scenes. These photographs, together with oral histories passed down in my family, became the ground through which I began to consider how belief survives: not as certainty, but as something carried through images, stories, and material traces.

Growing up in Lucban, Quezon, where Catholic devotion exists alongside vernacular beliefs, I became aware of how protection is not only prayed for, but also narrated, repeated, and embedded in everyday gestures and objects. This project extends beyond my own family through research into local oral histories, Philippine folk Catholicism, and vernacular belief systems, allowing personal memory and cultural context to inform one another.

In making the work, I use archival photographs, photographic prints, an overhead projector, acetate transparencies, and selected objects connected to the investigation. I construct layered analog projections that are documented through photography. Rather than digitally manipulating images, I bring photographs, projected light, drawings, and physical objects into the same space, allowing them to overlap and interfere with one another. These temporary arrangements mirror the instability of memory itself—how it shifts, fades, and is continually reconstructed through retelling while still shaping the present.

All archival photographs used in this project come from my family’s collection and are used as research material with the knowledge of my immediate family. Newly produced photographs are made by the artist, and consent will be obtained from any identifiable living individuals included in future iterations of the work.

At its core, What Shadows Remember is not an attempt to recover what has been lost, but to remain with its absence. It asks how belief continues to move through what remains, and how photography might hold the fragile space where memory, history, and inheritance quietly overlap.

Christian Babista - @ianbabista