naomieh jovin | ig: @njovn
(she/her) is a first-generation Haitian-American photographic artist who was born and raised in Philadelphia. She moved in and around Philly her whole life, attending the Arts Academy at Benjamin Rush for her formative school years, and later pursuing a BFA in Photography and Digital Arts at Moore College.
Naomieh told me about a photo album she had as a child that her mother made for her. It was pink with frills and had beads that hung from it, and a heart shape on the front that held a photo of her as a baby. She took it with her everywhere, often adding her own images and drawings to it and piecing together narratives in her head about the photographs and stories it carried inside.
There is no question why Jovin turned to her family's archive as she came into the niche of her work. While looking through her family’s photo album allowed her to step into a past she had known only through recitation, she also found journalistic qualities in the way she processed these histories through her photographic practice.
Jovin’s images function as a scribe. They are representative of how familial history is told and retold through remembrance in the absence of loved ones. Through the reappropriation of family photographs and in creation of new imagery, Jovin examines intergenerational and personal trauma, using the photographic image to reshape her memories of her family and simultaneously use them as a means to suture wounds that ruminate her past and whisper through the present.
