In Awe of Memory - PhMuseum

In September 2025, I journeyed to Morocco. I originally thought it would be documenting the sunrise from the red dunes of the Sahara that would stay with me long after it was over, but it was the people in the mountains that enchanted me most. Travelling through Todgha Gorge, with the city of Tinghir looking on, my steps alongside the Atlas Mountains felt strangely personal and reflective. It was in that surreal instance I had actually realised where I was and what I was doing. Concentrating on one step in front of another, my thoughts whittled away in the hot sun, sweat beading down my face to a trance-like rhythm.

What broke the spell was a chance meeting with two Berber children. Bounding across rock and stone, their confronting honesty and energy struck me awake. Moment upon moment of powerful immediacy followed as we exchanged glances, sweets and greetings. In the knowing silhouette of mountains looming, overhanging, celebrating; I felt awoken to life. That my body had reached for this moment before it had happened, and now I know of it.

There is this feeling, that washes over me as I remember. It is like I am there again but from further away. It was the difference between seeing and looking at my own memories, less experiential, more of a matter-of-fact flatness of truth. Removed of all time’s assertions over its interwoven value, an archival study yet to be translated into contemporary thought, yet to be discovered from under years of dust and cobwebs. The memory itself may be something small, a gesture that pairs with a scent drifting through an open door, the directness of a child’s eye contact, locked with curiosity and uncertainty. A contextual plank hanging over the edge of a boat, that in the act of stepping out and onto it, the feeling of remembering reclaims a present past. Time travelling with what we have learnt to see clearer, more acutely, less sentimentally, obviously. It is in the act of remembering that I unpick the awe of my own experiences. Even reclaiming them, reinvigorating them beyond what was before. I have, for as long as I have known, been able to see the spaces my memories inhabit in far greater detail than what the experience imbues. From the earliest moment, I have been able to recall the walls around me, the height I was sitting at, the stillness in which I acknowledged where I was. That perhaps, I knew that I would want to recall such a moment in the future, that time, in this instance was evoking a pre-remembering of something to come and return to and from.

Consider my earliest memory, I was very low to the ground. I could feel the thick shag carpet with my hands. What felt like a vaulted ceiling was in truth probably a normal lid on a room missing of colour. The cream carpeting blended into the walls and all I could make out was darkness and shadow moving around me, I wasn’t scared, I felt safe. I do distinctly remember seeing out of a nearby patio window. It must have been confusing enough that I committed it to memory. Although the frame of the window was straight and level, the road outside was steep, almost 45 degrees. Cars held onto the road and people walked unusually in the heavy rain and wind. Years had gone by with this memory that when I retold it to family, they placed it immediately in time. I was in the lobby of a hotel, and I was not even 2 years old. I don’t remember anything else from the holiday. This began a growing sense of connectivity to the spaces in my memory. Actions, events, even people, faded in the mind. Only for the rooms in between to remain. The more I have given time to it, what has emerged has felt definitive, instinctive. Spaces (even outside ones) have become colourless. I can’t physically recall their vibrance. It has faded so fast that as vivid as they may feel, my memories are dipped in black ink, paper rinsed and left to dry until I find them, in their monochromatic resonance of a life living.

It has not only been colour that has left my memories first, it has been the sky. Growing storm clouds would blot out the sun from my times long gone. I knew that there was no rain at the time, and the days couldn’t have been any brighter, but the swell of darkness above me, a rich and deep hue of inky black, sat like a roof obscuring the coming elements. It wasn’t a feeling of drifting absence or erasure of my memory though. It was my memory. I see it. There is a preciousness in what is left. Light seems to emanate from each moment’s centre, revealing shapes and shadows. People appear through phasing vibrations, and the edges of other rooms or the next moments are shrouded. For a long time I felt that perhaps the shroud concealing nearby would lift, that reaching for those hidden memories would reveal what is underneath. But the more I did this, the more this shroud of ink and shadow was as immovably my memory as the details I can intently see. There seems to be a comfort in this, that not everything needs to be clear. I cannot see my future as much as I cannot vividly see my past. We can be at odds with the mechanisation of memory, that through its explicit and obsessive documentation we are alive through the devices we use to define it. My images, colourful and vivid, are of times spent around technology. My memory of the same time spent, is illusive, ethereal, monochrome, and filled with uncertain voids and absences. The same lung breathes for the heart and mind, we grow from the light radiating onto us and wisdom grows in the shadows it casts. Both nourish the act of remembering. That this in all its facets, means something to all of us.

What would it mean to dwell on those moments within the memories of those we are in the middle of. That being sentimental of what is happening right now and knowing, even with the sharpest eye and thought, we may not get it all. It is a powerful antidote for time’s movement. That life can pass us by, and by knowing it has, we are richer in the biography we share with eachother. These photos may not represent a traditional conclusion, but instead are of moments between times together. They linger ever slightly longer, the slow goodbye of a moment immediate. A thinly stretched shaft of light between us. It is not quite dark just yet, I can still see the sun through the clouds, reflected on the stillness of a turquoise pool of water. An opaque vision beginning and ending the same way, as it always has. With the shapes of ourselves made out in the memory of my time moving.