I love this quote by Teju Cole, “The texture of memory and the texture of dreams are curiously similar.” It’s an excerpt from his book Blindspot, you can read the entire passage if you click here.
Sometimes memories really do feel like dreams, I think that’s what I like about analog photography, the flaws in it mimic the impermanence of dreams and the soft edges of memory.
The photographs below don’t feel like they were taken by me, I don’t feel like I was witness to those moments. They feel like some other person’s narrative, a dream I didn’t have.
Photos are tricky like that, they lie as much as they tell the truth. They give me a window into the past but the window is limited by the edges of the frame. I look at my compositional choices and I wonder what I was thinking at the time, or if I was thinking at all. I wonder if I should even open this window or if it should remain shut. There is a thin line between rumination and nostalgia.
Michael Hoffman, the former publisher of Aperture, had the idea that sequencing a series of photographs is akin to reading tea leaves. So here I present you with a little I Ching style grid of my past, leaves in the bottom of the metaphorical cup left for you to interpret. Take a deep breath and let it out slowly. What do you see? What do you feel?
