Past Presence

Limited edition prints available.

This work was a process of revisitation. A return to half-forgotten places of childhood. The strange relationship between constructive imagination, memory, and truth, are central to this work.

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has shown that it is possible to plant false memories that are experienced as indistinguishable from authentic memory. Research has shown that siblings can transpose memories and that deeply held childhood memories are sometimes entirely manufactured, with no basis in verifiable events. This prompts consideration of the extent to which our memories can be said to reflect objective truth.

The process of accessing memories is inherently constructive, as the mind recreates places and experiences in the moment of recollection. The blending and augmenting of memories with imagined elements, as well as the subjective interpretation and context that can alter the meaning of a memory, further complicate our understanding of the past. The camera also transforms an instant of objective reality into an intrinsically misleading representation.

This series explores an encounter between the re-experiencing of a place of memory and the subjective reconstruction of that place in the mind. The memory rebuilt anew at the moment of recall, patchworked from adjacent memories, imagined details, received stories and fragments of subjective experience—a psychic collision with a present in which the past no longer exists.

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Each panorama was shot digitally and then transferred to analogue film. The scenes then recreated by exposing chemically treated mixed materials to the negative in the darkroom. Each silver gelatin print was then hand collaged back together to recreate the original scene. An act of physically reconstructing memory.

The collaged objects were then photographed once more and placed back into the original scenes as digital composites.

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This series received a Neutral Density (ND) Award in 2021.

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