“It is because the photographs carry no certain meaning in themselves, because they are like images in the memory of a total stranger, that they lend themselves to any use"
--Susan Sontag
Susan Sontag’s consideration of the relationship between a photograph and memory was one of the starting points for my series of photographs. I am drawn to the idea that photographs can function not just as documents, but also as something new, constructed, and somewhat abstract—as if they were from the mind of a stranger.
I find the workings of memory to be fascinating: what we remember, what we forget, how we construct memories, and how things we don’t remember essentially disappear. Images, especially photographs, play an important role in how we remember. They function as factual documents of our experiences, but they can also create the illusion of a memory that does not actually exist. My photographs engage this capacity of the mind to reconstruct memories from images by reflecting an abstract sense of remembrance rather than illustrating actual memories.
To achieve this, I first find a somewhat strange (if also very ordinary) location. These spaces are frequently composed of things humans have left behind—average things, such as plastic tubes or a bookshelf, but taken into a less identifiable context they seem odd. Some of the locations also reflect ways in which humans have altered the natural landscape. Using these found locations, instead of sets that I constructed myself, gives the photographs an anchor in physical reality that balances the strange and whimsical aspects of the images and allows the viewers to see commonplace elements from their world in a new way.
Secondly, I put a figure and physical text into these mysterious settings to enliven them, creating a relationship between these two elements and the space that seems both authentic and obscure. I bring text into the image by placing wire letters that I constructed into the scene to be photographed. The letters form phrases from psychological and philosophical books concerning memory. The objective nature of this text creates a tension with the new circumstance created in the photograph. In this new context, the text becomes more abstract, while retaining a sense of authority based simply on its unexplained presence in the spaces.
Photography is an apt medium for this type of work because of its unique ability to capture reality. Berenice Abbott claimed, while discussing the effects of pictorialism on the history of photography, that, “If a medium is representational by nature of the realistic image formed by a lens, I see no reason why we should stand on our heads to distort that function." I want to use this realistic image, however, to capture a constructed reality and in doing so create a tension with the idea of reliable memory formation. I chose to take black and white photographs with a Holga camera, which is less reliable and less accurate than a SLR camera, so that my images would visually reflect the idea that a camera, like memory, interprets reality.
As a series, the resulting photographs move between states of being, varying from entrapment to passivity to a sense of freedom, and sometimes existing in between. In the process, they mediate this tension between reality and the mysterious quality of memory.
