“I believe that photography is not about creation—it’s a process to evoke memory; to refresh something that already exists in our minds; something that is growing weak and abstract and needs to find expression…”
~ Quentin Shih
There’s a pattern in my photography, one I have failed to see for so long, until this summer. Trying to figure out why certain subjects attract me, I took the past few months to just randomly shoot and discovered a connection to my past. Sometimes it’s not blatantly apparent but there’s a sense of time, of place…
of home
in each image.
I recently came across an article, Frames of Mind: Photography, Memory and Identity by Patricia Marcella Anwandter, University of Pennsylvania. In it she writes –
As Pavel Buchler has commented in Ghost Stories “in every photograph we retain possession of what is no longer ours: not just a past but a certain place in history”. The creation and possession of a photograph highlights the very nature of that which can not be captured and owned. As we hold on to these precious artifacts of time, we are offered a comfort that that moment can be held on to, that that very instant in time could live on forever. Buchler describes the role of photographs as conceptual maps of the self. However, unlike maps, which are projections into the future, photographs offer the physical union through which the past and present intersect. As he explains, photographs “keep under constant tension the fragile links between the residue of lived moments and memory, between where we have been and who we are (what we are always becoming)”
At times I have thought about changing the tagline to this site –
“where are you going, where have you been?”
but now I see
it’s a perfect fit
Licht Years 