A Poor Sort Of Memory
This collection of photographs was made in and around my hometown in the California desert. As I revisit old hideouts in concrete washes and private bunks in rock formations, I am reminded of a past laden with trauma and my youthful desperation to find both a sense of belonging and independence. I would escape the morbid chaos of my family home and take refuge in the periphery.
Now I return to these spaces to photograph. This land is strikingly beautiful but also feels both claustrophobically familiar and alien with dis-belonging. There is ambivalence as I explore this landscape. I contend with the conflict of the seemingly objective reality before me versus the subjective truth of my memories. I find myself chasing ghosts and evading monsters. I struggle to parse memory from fantasy and reflection from projection.
As I work, I embrace this unreliable narrator and use the tracings of my history to craft a new loose photographic fiction. Do I believe making photographs will bring back some sort of truth? My experience is the opposite. The pictures seem to take me further down the rabbit hole. And as the White Queen says to Alice,...“It’s a poor sort of memory that only works backwards.”
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