Like dust in the sunlight of a room..

Sonder & Descendant 

part one

I went from traveler to vagabond when my love of exploring new places got confused with my impulse to run. One year became five. People moved on with their lives, like I had meant to do with my own. Now I am filled with ghosts and landscapes and I do not know what to do with them. Months and years tear from the calendar, one after the other, and the pages carried off by a cartoon dust cloud behind a speeding car.

Such amnesia between the photographs I have made. They land in my awareness like distress flares thrown into the darkness of my unconscious. They illuminate everything for just a moment, letting me see what has been standing right there the entire time, before I am plunged back into forgetting all over again.

In the world between the photographs my memories cannibalize themselves in the fight for remembrance, and they seem to be driven purely by my emotional life, by how I am feeling at the time. This sounds terrifying and fragile, but I fear this may be true for all of us. The significance of our memories is ever changing, shifting in and out of focus with time and perspective.  

Photographs are indeed life markers, but not always because of their content, location, or the person depicted, but simply because there happens to be a photograph in the first place. This is where a photo's true value can grow out from too. From It’s own mysterious presence in the world, demanding that we connect with it then leaving us full of questions. How can photos of a seemingly insignificant moment in life become as precious to us as the actual life defining memories where no photographs were made at all? Perhaps photographs are artifacts from our lives and possessing them is proof of our participation in it

Without photographs I would truly be lost in time in a world without gravity, and all the pictures that were not taken when I had the chance, will float there, like dust in the sunlight of a room where I lay on the floor slowly regaining consciousness.

Both Sonder and Descendant are available to order from Bump Books.