Norah Delaney

(b.1955; resides Wilmette, IL)

What I remember about being young may or may not be what really happened, but I’m not interested in truth. Sentiments remain and I try to record the impressions that still echo in my head. Memories are easily distorted and become less well-defined with time. So my photographs are not focused, but for me, they are revealing. Present. Past. Future. Life is not linear. - Norah Delaney

After the death of her father in 1997, Norah Delaney returned to her childhood home on the south side of Chicago to take pictures of images from her youth and preserve her father’s memory. Not only do the pictures create a record of her childhood, they also touch upon the important themes of memory, loss, and love. To create these images, Delaney used Polaroid Polapan film, scanned it, and then made archival digital prints. This process led to a soft focus and high levels of ink saturation, which Delaney feels “make these places appear as they do in my mind; hazy, half-forgotten glimpses of my past.”

Delaney received her BA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She has also studied at the International Center for Photography in New York and in the Museum Studies program at Northwestern University. Her work is held in numerous permanent collections, including those at the Bibliotèque Nationale de France; the International Polaroid Collection; the Rockford Art Museum; and Chicago’s Peace Museum. She currently works at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.