'Alba Zari: The Y
by Aaron Schuman
Winter 2019

This essay was originally published in Foam - Issue #55: "Talent 2020"

Alba Zari was born to an Italian mother in Mission Hospital Bangkok in 1987, and spent her earlier years enjoying a seemingly carefree childhood in Thailand with her brother, mother and Thai father, Katanapanangsakul Weerachart. Yet in March of 2016, Zari discovered for certain that her father was, quite literally, not the man she thought he was. Several years earlier, her brother had mentioned that he strongly suspected they had different biological fathers, and after more than two years of uncertainty, she finally submitted an envelope containing samples of her own saliva, as well as that of Weerachart, to the DNA Diagnostics Center, one of the most highly accredited genetic testing laboratories in the world. The results that she received read: "The alleged father lacks the genetic markers that must be contributed to the child by the biological father. The probability of paternity is 0%."


Both this revelation and its confirmation lead Zari on a long and convoluted fact-finding mission – as well a deeply personal photographic journey – in search of the truth, and in some sense, of herself. "For twenty-five years I projected myself as being half-Thai and half-Italian", she explains. "So as soon as I learned this information I began to question everything; where I'm from, where I belong, and the medium of photography itself as well. I have many images with the person I thought was my father – and those pictures are a lie."


The resulting body of work, The Y, takes its title from the Y-chromosome, which is only passed biologically from fathers to sons, and contains the genetic traces of the paternal line. As a woman, such traces are absent within Zari's own cells, and although she can identify the ancestral origins of her maternal line – mostly Polish and Irish – through DNA analysis, those of her biological father remain a mystery. Thus, The Y represents a comprehensive and fascinating collection of material, photographic and otherwise, that Zari gathered over the course of two years while searching for, and ultimately failing to find, information that might otherwise have been easily acquired if she had been born a man. It interrogates and intricately weaves together a broad range of Zari's personal and investigative visual archive - fuzzy screengrabs from VHS home movies; manipulated snapshots from her family albums; meticulously straightforward, physiognomical head-shots made of Zari, her brother, Weerachart, and even a homeless street-artist named Gary (whose name appears on her birth certificate (he picked her mother up from the hospital after Zari was born) and whom she eventually tracked down in California, where he was living in a van); and much more. At one point, she digitally cuts her own facial features from various large-format black-and-white self-portraits and directly compares her strikingly almond-shaped eyes, prominent aquiline nose, and full, wide lips with the distinctly different and more subdued equivalents found in the faces her mother and grandmother in old family pictures. In other instances she photographs her own hands, thighs and legs and makes the same direct visual comparison, finding that they align almost identically with those of her maternal line. Upon learning through a business card found at her grandmother's house that her biological father was most likely an Iranian, Iraqi or Kuwaiti employee of Emirates airlines named Massad, she even goes so far as to acquire 3D scans of her own head, creates a computer-generated avatar of herself as an emotionally "neutral" fifty-year-old man, and then uses this – unsuccessfully – to image-search the internet for a "Massad" that might visually match. "From the beginning of this work, I was not interested in using a consistent aesthetic", Zari notes. "I wanted to use the medium of photography in every way I could, and in every step of the research. Photography, in many different forms, was a tool that I was using to find out something I needed to know. But throughout, I was also simultaneously questioning the meaning of photography as a document that proves a fact; and I wanted the project to reflect that aspect of it as well."


To these ends, carefully embedded within all the evidentiary imagery and documentation gathered over the course of Zari's research is also a portfolio of more ambiguous, observational photographs – presented in the form of black-and-white negatives – taken by Zari during her research trips to Berlin, Bangkok, Trieste, Positano, and Los Angeles. An elderly woman's hand obscures the face of an imperial Roman bust; an American flag stuck in a chain-link fence wilts for lack of wind; a naked man swims out into the waves of an open sea; a curious snake, a well-worn bible, a drawn hotel curtain, and the skeleton of a primate all curiously confront the camera; and more. Rather than pointing to fact or connoting any inkling of certainty, these images seem to allude to an underlying sense of irresolution, and perhaps a much more profound and very personal truth. "The rest of the work is very rational and has an investigative aesthetic; I kept my emotional distance as I tried to understand the past and put it in order," Zari explains. "But of course, while I was traveling, I also took lots of pictures. And eventually, I understood that they were much more evocative of the emotions and frustrations I was experiencing as I repeatedly failed to find any definitive information about my father. I realised that I needed to include them, but I left them as negatives, because they're pieces of information that have not been fully developed. They represent the unconscious and emotional process of this journey. In the end, I just couldn't exclude my feelings from my research – the two things cannot be separated from one another; they live together."


Ultimately, through its remarkably thorough, diverse and determined approach, as well as through its multifaceted and multilayered aesthetic, The Y represents the veracious limits of the photographic medium itself, and at the same time reveals its potential for both real possibility and true discovery despite such limitations. "Many of my questions are still unanswered and I don't have any sense of resolution, but I'm now at peace with not knowing, and recognizing that half of me is a mystery," Zari reflects. "I've learned to live with that; and that in itself is cathartic. To this day, I can only truly know my maternal line – the X. My connection to anything else – The Y – is imaginary."