A Poor Sort of Memory

A Poor Sort of Memory is a series of photographs made in my hometown in the California desert. I use my own personal history to craft a photographic fiction that contends with the function of memory and the perils of coming of age.

A POOR SORT OF MEMORY is a collection of photographs made around my hometown in the California desert where I attempt to face the flaws of memory and the perils of coming of age. 

After the birth of my child, I felt an urge to return home to reconcile my own tumultuous upbringing. As I revisit old hideouts in rock formations and skate spots in concrete washes, I am reminded of a past laden with trauma and my youthful desperation to find both belonging and independence. As a child contending with my father’s death, I would escape the morbid chaos of my family home and take refuge in the edges. 

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.”