Kitchen Memories
Getting to Know Hannah Latham

Hannah Latham is a recent graduate of Rhode Island School of Design’s Photography BFA program with a minor in race, gender, and sexuality studies. Her work investigates themes of memory, patriotism, and the environment in the form of cyanotypes or inkjet prints. Based in Boston, MA, she is an assistant at Gallery Kayafas and works with Finnish photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen.
Hannah has done commercial work for Wire Magazine, among others.

Kitchen Memories, part of her thesis exhibition at RISD, is a series of eight cyanotype placemats and three embroidery hoops made from digital collages using photographs, documents, and objects from her maternal family archive. Each placemat represents a decade of her grandparents’ lives, starting with their childhood in Hungary, immigration to the United States, leading up until today. Newspaper clippings, patches, her Grandmother’s veil, album photographs, and love letters overlap to highlight the main familial events from each period. The collages were then exposed onto fabric treated with a cyanotype emulsion and surrounded by a border of machine-stitched motifs from traditional Hungarian embroidery particular to that decade. Telling a personal narrative of the American dream, this series aims to connect the nostalgia of one’s cultural identity with the food on their plate and their loved ones sitting around them. 

The corresponding embroidery hoops are made with a similar process using collaged recipe cards from the women in my family who came before me, some in their handwriting. Overlaid with hand-embroidered traditional Hungarian flowers, the recipes evoke a sense of time and memory spent in the kitchen with them growing up.