These images are from a conceptual essay exploring the drive to narrate my life. I'm constantly changing the edits; digging through old files and sitting on images for a long time before deciding whether or not I like them. I print books of this work for myself. Personal journals.
My life isn't as crazy as these pictures look. They're true, though. I feel photos more than I make them. It wasn't until recently that I began to understand this work that I've created between long term documentary projects and editorial commissions. It's passive. It's been in front of me. It's been shot, it's been filed, and it's been brought to it's own existence when the time was right. It's fluid and ever-changing.
A few photos in you'll find a scene of a bedroom. The sheets are ruffled, slept in. Above the bed, orange morning light produces the shape of windows above my the wall. In the bottom right corner there's a heat register. It's an image of a dorm room, my dorm room, on June 4, 2008 at 6:03 am. I had been dating a girl for a little less than a year. She had been in Spain for 3 months and was coming home in two days. She called me at 5:58 am, in tears, to tell me she cheated on me the night before. I wasn't upset at the time, just shocked. I made sure she was okay; was more concerned for her safety than any other feelings. I knew I needed to remember this moment- it was an important one to my continuing development as an adult. I made a picture of what was in front of me.
Two years later I came back to it and realized why I was drawn to it, and why it needed a place. It's things like that I look for in these photographs. I analyze and over-analyze everything that has feeling to me. I choose based on my memory of what I felt then, and how I feel about that now, and how that moment had an affect on me. Or how it didn't, and maybe how it should have. I'm impulsive. I'm a wanderlust. I was in Pittsburgh the day after Thanksgiving and took the time to find a friend's old house, without directions (it wasn't far out of the way.) I went based off of memory, even though he hasn't lived there in four years and I haven't been there in five. I wanted to see somewhere I once was, just for the sake of seeing somewhere that I once was. That's what these pictures are- snippets of ephemera and fleeting moments that would otherwise be forgotten.
