It is not about being able to remember..

 

Sometimes I have been known to “balance the books”, karmically, on an experience I have had against the photographs I made during the experience itself. I have been especially conscious of doing this when the experience was not an entirely positive one. In these cases I always hope the photographs will serve someday as a kind of redemption for me. I hope that the pictures rescued from negative experiences will later transcend themselves and deliver up some higher positive truth, a glimmer of closure, or a reason why it was all meant to be. In the past, photographs have in fact been the only positive thing I have been left with and having the photographs, possessing them, is somehow like my way of taking back control again, to make the final definitive sense of. This sounds like a lot to hope for from photographs, but if our lives are actually the stories we tell ourselves, then photographs can be an integral part of telling that story.

In the looking back at these pictures, these disturbances from the surface of the world, I am instantly informed of how sharp my photographic instinct really is. I mean the truth of it, for better or worse, there before me. What are the images that work, and why? What did I try to photograph, but failed to? What did I miss altogether and for what reason? What photographs did I wish I’d taken? Which photographs would be considered key images now that they can be viewed together? Looking at collected pictures can be a meditation on how I have perceived my life and how much I was paying attention while living it.

Looking at one's own photographs can indeed be full of personal revelation when viewed from a distance and in the safety of one's own home and assembling them is where I have found the parallel narrative of my life emerges out from. These pictures plot their own path and carry their own weight and insist on telling their own story, not truth and not fiction, but something which weaves between the two and is perhaps more akin to poetry.

Photographs are a conduit for my experiences and they put me in direct contact with the past, which is, for me, not about being able to remember, but rather to re-inhabit it from the present with all my original injuries and hindsight wisdom in tact. If photographs can be considered the fruits of these experiences, then the feedback they generate reminds me, ultimately, that no experience is wholly positive or negative.

In order to make this leap back through time it is often not the photograph's subject that I need to connect with, but to instead find a psychic entry point, either within an image or it may be the image itself. A seemingly benign picture can be a portal back into the world of that photograph and it is there that redemption can sometimes be found. They are a chance to reframe and resolve the past through a constellation of photographic anomalies, with the hope of finding meaning, clarity and then finally, healing.