memories, dreams

"I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn't mine anymore, but one in which I'd found the simplest and most lasting joys."
  - Albert Camus "The Stranger"

In this series of works, I explore the ambiguous relationship between the real world and photography’s re-creation or re-imagining of that real world. Throughout the history of photography, photographs have been used as commemorative markers or reliable confirmations of individual and collective experiences, serving the purpose of preserving memories. But the reality is more complex than that. Even as our unmediated memories of people, places, and events begin to fade with the passage of time, the reconstructed memories that we derive from photographs take on an enduring permanent quality, gradually creating in our mind a blended or even new reality. I use photography to capture this process in which our unmediated memories become mixed with—and sometimes entirely replaced by—idealized recollections or even illusory dreams that reflect more wish than fact. To achieve this, I separate landscape photographs from their contours and characteristics to alienate them from their original reality, and let the textures that remain stimulate the viewer’s own imagination. Subsequently, the actual substances of objects become irrelevant; what remains, or becomes, important are the fictional realities, wishful remembrances, and reconstructed feelings that have developed in the mind of the viewer.