kevin o'farrell

A love story told in flickering frames, studies for a portrait of dick-and-marta reconstructs the fragile memory of a young couple captured in the grainy footage of their past. The book is built from individual stills of an old home video — dick-and-marta, just starting their adult lives, sitting together on the porch of their first house. The film has deteriorated with time, its images marred by glitches, static, and dropouts. But in the decay, something deeper emerges.

Each distorted frame is a meditation on love and time — on the quiet moments that, in their imperfection, reveal the truth of a life shared. The missing fragments, the interference, the places where the image collapses into noise —these do not erase the past but expose its essence. The couple’s future is already there, flickering between the lines: the joys and hardships, the silences that will grow between them, the tenderness that will endure.

At once intimate and elusive, studies for a portrait of dick-and-marta is a meditation on memory, loss, and the way time reworks the images we hold onto, turning them into something both familiar and unknowable.