Andrea Birnbaum: Spilt Milk – LENSCRATCH

©Andrea Birnbaum, Cover from Spilt Milk

Families are formed not solely by the tales they inform, but additionally by the tales they can not inform. We inherit greater than images, objects, or heirlooms from our mother and father, we additionally inherit methods of seeing the world, methods of behaving, fears, and wounds that always originate lengthy earlier than we’re born.  Whether acknowledged or hidden, the previous leaves traces, echoing by means of relationships and shaping the methods we love, talk, and perceive ourselves.

Andrea Birnbaum‘s new monograph, Spilt Milk, is an exploration of these echoes. At its core, Spilt Milk is about inheritance: the burdens we supply, the tales we take in, and the potential of breaking cycles by means of understanding. It is a meditation on household, reminiscence, forgiveness, and the sophisticated methods love survives, even when it’s imperfectly expressed.

Andrea Birnbaum is a photographer and educator whose private work explores reminiscence, id and belonging.  Her images and documentary initiatives have been exhibited all through the nation and internationally. She teaches images and mentors college students each on-line and in-person, and leads retreats and workshops internationally. She presently lives within the New York City space. Andrea is the Educational Coordinator for the Photographic Nights of Selma Photo Festival, an annual pageant held every November in Selma, Alabama.

Instagram: @andreabirnbaumphoto

©Andrea Birnbaum, Dad and Me from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Dad and Dollhouse from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Grandma and Mom from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Grandma from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Open Flap from Spilt Milk

Spilt Milk

Spilt Milk is about household, reminiscence, and what is handed down by means of generations, particularly from my grandmother to her son, my father, to me. Using my father’s outdated images, household pictures and my very own newly constructed photographs, I’m exploring how generational trauma has affected him, and our relationship.

I started this venture making an attempt to wrestle with my anger and frustration towards my father. I ended it with one thing I by no means anticipated: empathy and understanding.

For a lot of my profession, I’ve labored in a documentary fashion, drawn time and again to the threads of girlhood, womanhood, belonging, and id. But with Spilt Milk, I turned the digicam inward. Instead of looking for tales in others, I started tracing my very own. I wished to know myself, to sift by means of reminiscence and picture till I may see extra clearly.

It turned obvious to me that my sophisticated emotions revolved round my father. At instances, heat and loving, however then within the blink of a watch his incapability to specific himself in any means apart from yelling appeared. I remembered the shouting matches that shook the partitions of our home, my mother and father’ voices crashing into one another like storms. I hated the noise, the anger, the way in which it crammed the air. I’d retreat to my room, hiding from a world that felt too risky to belong to. As my father bought older, and retired from the job that gave him his self value, melancholy appeared, touching all of us, and making him unable to attach along with his household.

Spilt Milk weaves collectively fragments of our lives—household images, the portraits my father, as a hobbiest photographer, beloved making, and pictures I constructed years later. In the layering, tearing, and recomposing, I searched for tactics to specific the invisible wounds I felt from the silence after the arguments, the phrases that by no means got here, the way in which my father’s fury over one thing as trivial as “spilt milk” formed the environment of our residence, and the melancholy that seeped into each household gathering in later years.

In altering these images—ripping, collaging, obscuring—I used to be additionally dealing with reminiscence as I imagined it was, shifting perspective, and inching towards reconciliation. My father was each: a person who might be loving, supportive, and beneficiant, but additionally essential, domineering, and unpredictable.

And nonetheless, he gave me images. He put a digicam—my first Nikkormat—into my fingers. He constructed me darkrooms. He taught me the best way to see, the best way to watch for a picture to look. Even when his phrases lower me down, even when he withheld reward, images was our language. It was the present that tethered us collectively.

As I gained confidence in my work, and commenced to make photographs in a means he didn’t perceive, distance grew.

Discovering that he had not printed the candid pictures of my childhood as a result of he was extra occupied with making and printing his portraits of others created confusion and frustration in me that my childhood had been misplaced to his want for adulation.

When I photographed the belongings of my grandmother Alice—his mom, whom I adored—I assumed I used to be preserving reminiscence. But in listening to my kin’ tales, I realized she was additionally formidable, and might be unkind. I started to know that the hardness I felt from my father had been carved into him lengthy earlier than it reached me. Where as soon as I noticed solely his distance, now I noticed sorrow. His childhood had bled into mine.

Over time, the pictures revealed one thing bigger than ache. For all their rips and tears, additionally they carry connection, historical past, and the threads that bind a household even when love feels fractured.

And then life did one thing astonishing. After a critical well being scare, my father briefly softened. The man who had barked, criticized, and withdrawn emerged humbled, open, and—for the primary time—apologetic. He admitted his faults. He mentioned he was sorry.

It was one thing I by no means anticipated: the validation I had longed for, the apology I assumed would by no means come, Did he change his methods utterly? No, however I’m totally different now, and don’t react in anger to him, however with extra persistence and understanding. – Andrea Birnbaum, 2026

©Andrea Birnbaum, Destroying the Past from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Family Time from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Forgotten Childhood from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Heartbreak from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Helplessness from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Hidden from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Holding Memories from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, How to Be from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Keeping his distance from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Pieces of Me from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Protecting Myself from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Sadness from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Spilt Milk from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, Trying to Connect from Spilt Milk

©Andrea Birnbaum, What is Not There from Spilt Milk

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