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.

No sign of that world out here anyway..

Sonder & Descendant 

part two

All the thoughts that I never heard myself say, which once seemed so important and profound, that I did not have the presence of mind to write down, were actually only feelings that I was having, because when I try to recall them now, to say the words out loud, I find they are suddenly ungraspable and they are made of the same nebulous vocabulary of dreams, or drugs. I am an amnesiac grasping at photographs for proof and witness, but it is like the tightening grip on a handful of sand, "Look, here, this, see!" All the scattered pieces of a broken mirror have the same reflection looking back.

A backdrop panoramic montage of dramatic landscapes and an asphalt ribbon of a road that can only be measured in stops for gasoline and all the photographs seen but not taken. While the space between is strung out on a thread of cigarettes and coffee and medicated by this, that, or the other, if I'm lucky. Where the odometer counts my breaths in miles driven in an hour and the AC wheezes like a ventilator. This is my life support, this is my quarantine, and this is why I cannot seem to find the words to say out loud. I am accelerating and everything has so much distance between it and one point is so far from the next that I lose my way between them sometimes.

Crackling campfire in the Mojave desert, a carnival of coyotes out in the darkness, we are all just passing through this night together. I have pitched my tent on rocks and I will sleep on the ground and let dreams make the sense that I cannot. I will look at the maps and find out where I am going in the morning. Fuck the news, there is no sign of that world out here anyway and I haven't been near another soul in weeks.

It is here in the dark silence between bedrock and eternity where I feel the world forget that I am part of it and any light ever held for me in another's heart, go out. The memories of all the lives I held close and dear, finally run their own course too until they flicker then glitch into the past tense. Now I cannot guess a single thing about their lives, just as they cannot guess a single thing about my own and for the first time in my life I am truly alone. 

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

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.