Memory
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthe wrote that “photography is the ability to capture time. The photograph is evidence that a moment existed.” A photograph is meant to plant the seeds of memory.
During Covid 19, in my series of photographs called Memory, I do capture a moment in time. However, it’s not the image we’d want to retain because of its richness or complexity, light or geometry. In fact, what I experience in shooting my Memory series is exactly the opposite of what Barthe stated about memory.
Here, before shooting each image, I try to think back and wish I had a picture or reference of what the space might have looked like. I know that life existed here, but it just picked up and disappeared.
These photographs show the fragility of the world we live in. They force us to conjure up scenarios of playgrounds full of children and restaurant parking lots full of cars and people. Without people as a reference, these images stand as monuments to another time. As with Easter Island, all that was left was monuments as clues to a civilization that had once existed.
