My artist statement

Several years ago I discovered a box of negatives that had once belonged to my grandmother. I felt like I had discovered a past treasure, a piece of my grandmother that I had never been privy to. I was presented the gift of a different perspective of my grandmother, yet the more I contemplated the images hidden within the negatives the more fascinated I became with the experience, the process, of looking at a photograph. Photography allows me to transport myself, as a viewer, back to that moment in which an experience is captured, it allows me to escape, to become a part of that moment, and to feel what it would have been like to be in the moment, experiencing all of the emotion that is captured in the faces or postures of the people in the photograph.

Surrounding myself with the past, through photography, allows me to gain a unique perspective as I meet my present and imagine my future self. There is art in the way the world works, the way people interact and react to situations and events; there is also art in memory and in the process of remembering an event, a process that changes over time and reshapes the past experience as it gathers the force of the ever-unfolding present. As time passes all one remembers of a specific event or time or person are fragments. The details that one imagines and visualizes, strung together with tangible facts, bring substance to memory. Most memories, regardless of how carefully we attempt to reconstruct them, become memory.

Nothing is ever completely accurate in human memory no matter how much we want to believe otherwise. A book cover remembered to be blue, for example, really may only have blue lettering in its title. The mind recalls distinct details and fills in the blanks, creating a self-styled, tailored history that serves our emotional need to remember people and experiences in ways that support our world view and self image.

Photography opens a doorway into the past, capturing something of the moment exactly as it appears to the camera at that time. Our mind takes that image and triggers our memory, over time that memory gets reconstructed and changes forever. Even the past three minutes are subjectively remembered.

Photographs of other people’s memorable moments are fascinating, to most people. As I look at other people’s photographs I wonder why that moment was memorable, who the people were or where that place was. My imagination then creates possible stories and scenarios about what may have been going on between the people in the photograph. Soon these stories envelop me and the photographs pull me into a space and time, a particular place and moment that may not exist anymore, except in someone’s memory or forgotten in the frozen space of the photograph. Wading through, swimming amongst, touching, breathing in the past and feeling the energy of these photographs inspires me to evoke imagine someone who existed in the photographs, at some moment in the past. This process transforms a photograph into a work of art. Art is a moving experience, whether it moves the viewer to anger, disgust, sadness, joy, or awe. The power of photography inspires me to explore my own expanding creativity and discover new aspects of myself.