One Step Back

One of our most sacred treasures is our memories. Remembering how an event happened or how a loved one looked is not such a simple mental spectacle. Usually when you think of these things, you produce multiple images in your mind. Your grandmother’s face, as well as her hands, her out of date dress, and the way she always decorated her living room. All these things are what fly through your mind when thinking about these people and places.

Due to the pliable nature of the digital medium, I am able to manipulate the images of my past and present to fit the way I recall them. For the past few years I have been documenting environments in a warped and nontraditional way, but I was doing so without realizing my true motivations. The connection between my photographic style and the notion of memory is a recent discovery that I’ve made about my work.

As of lately, my family has fallen under difficult times. My father’s declining mental state, due to Alzheimers, has taken a sharp turn for the worse in the past few months. With his extreme memory loss, came my own realization that the ability to reflect on our past is a privilege not to be taken for granted. I feel that vivid moments in one’s life cannot be expressed in a single photograph, but rather, in an elaborate replica that shows all aspects of the moment. I would not omit an important portion of an image just because it did not fit in a single frame. Now more than ever, I hesitate to erase a memory, whether real or photographic.