Family Reflux: recontextualizing an experience

Overview

My wife and I have started talking about having children. I look at myself transitioning into the role that my parents have had for me and I'm looking at my life in a certain duality: looking back as the child and looking forward as the parent.

In trying to understand this role reversal, I have put myself into my parents position by playing with old family images and adding myself into those images. These are images of a database alteration of my family's catalog. I have inserted myself as an adult into images of myself as documented by my parents. There is a certain amount of ambiguity which gives a possible Freudian psycho-sexual reading to the pictures. Coming from a psychology background, I admit that this idea has surfaced many times while working on these pieces.

I have always chosen pictures which include myself as a child because I have wondered, do I really want to raise a child who becomes like myself? I don't want my children to make the same mistakes I have, but as I watch my brother and sister raise their children, I often wonder about what my children will be like, since I have only experienced one childhood. I don't know how my children are going to end up, but are our experiences together going to be similar to what I experienced?