Mindy Rinkenberger
My early photography is saturated with a sense of death. I later came to understand that I was photographing all the places that were missing the physical presence of my father; that I was trying to capture his ghost in the faces of my family members and in the emptiness that his presence left in rooms and landscapes.

As a child the show Unsolved Mysteries disturbed me and yet I also found it humorous. The total infidelity to the traumatic nature of the events portrayed within the reenactments of these real traumas is to me revealing of the nature of the tissue of American television culture. I constantly look for the humor and the beauty in death in order to distance myself from the punch of its emotional reality.

In my work, I attempt to bridge this gap between humor and trauma by pairing my own works with what I consider to be my families "work", in essence, to be the families curator.