As I Found It: My Mother's House (Twelve Point Books) is a highly focused photographic essay about memory and, in context, the ways in which dementia destroys identity and personal history. It is also an intimate study, through idiosyncratic objects and their settings, of an aging parent. Photographer, writer, and teacher Russell Hart created the book's photographs in his mother's house of over forty years, after cognitive decline made it impossible for her to stay. Some of the images show the home's interiors as he emptied it out for eventual sale, a process that took many months over the course of two years. Others are close-ups of some of the hundreds of boxed arrangements of objects, both practical and sentimental, assembled by his mother for organizational and archival purposes.The author's mother was a hoarder, yet also a lifelong organizer who made it her mission to create order in her massive cache. Indeed, much of the boxes' content is neatly arranged, but in ways that would have made sense only to her, using schemes she was no longer able to explain because of her dementia. The artifacts inside are often heavily annotated and labeled, as if she wished to caption an entire life, for posterity or practicality, in the tiny, perfect handwriting that had since abandoned her.

The obsessive-compulsive impulse that originally led to the boxes' creation was "cured" by her dementia.Produced in four-color digital black and white by Brilliant Graphics, printer of books by Sally Mann, Justine Kurland, and other noted fine-art photographers, the book's images feature a warm tone and delicate tonal scale akin to that of platinum/palladium prints. The story behind the photographs, and of his mother's decline, is told by Hart's own introduction, captions, and internal texts. Yet this information is sparing, leaving room for readers and viewers to bring their own experience to the book, in particular of caring for aging parents, dealing with familial hoarding behavior, and preserving a lifetime's memories-and the way in which those struggles revisit and reinvent the meaning of family.