URI_Research_Magazine_Momentum_Winter_2015_Melissa-McCarthy

understand the past so that it is not repeated.”

exhibition at SepiaEYE, New York City in November 2015.

In order to tell such personal stories, Matthew carefully selects her tools without sacrificing quality. She chooses her camera based on the project. In her portfolio Memories of India, she used a Holga, a $20 toy camera with one shutter speed and two f-stops. Blue Sky Books recently picked this work for a book, using a new photo publishing model and an eloquent essay by New York Times art critic Vicki Goldberg. “I chose to use this camera as no one takes me seriously with it and I am left alone on the streets in India rather than being surrounded by people,” says Matthew. “The camera’s focus is a single person, a group or the mountains. I liked the challenge of using such a simple tool to create beautiful, well-crafted images.” But what Matthews views as most important for this project, is that the plastic lens helps create an image that looks more like a memory, which dovetails with the aesthetic she sought to achieve in Memories of India . For “Open Wound,” Matthew used an Olympus camera for its ability to take high-quality images in the body of a compact camera. She explains, “The projects I work on entail me going into the homes of strangers and gaining their confidence to collaborate with me. I find the small camera less intimidating and it helps the

Among her widely acclaimed works, one project, “The Virtual Immigrant,” explores the ways that customer service workers in call centers in India similarly navigate between cultures. “They bifurcate their dress, speech and lives between the culture where they work—India—and the western workplace they exist within,” she says. “They seem to virtually live between cultures without leaving their country of origin.” The Importance o f aCamera In 2012, Matthew earned a Fulbright fellowship to explore the turmoil of families affected by the partition of India and Pakistan— the result of which manifested as the collection, “Open Wound.” Her work attempts to make these stories more accessible. Matthew’s Fulbright work was exhibited at URI in October 2014. She explains, “In 1947, 12 million people were displaced within three months and approximately a million died. But unlike other tragedies like the Holocaust, there is no memorial for those affected by the Partition. There is nothing to commemorate the experiences of the victims of this tragedy to help the larger public

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