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Memento Mori (2010)

The projected image has always struck me as a particularly unique and contradictory photographic experience.  Situated somewhere between photography’s stasis and film’s dynamism, this format offers up a theatricality that is largely absent from our quotidian encounter of photography on a day-to-day basis.  This move away from tactility toward a more ephemeral experience of the photograph has the ability to truly position the medium as one inherently rooted in mnemonics.  The transparency of the projected image mimics the way in which memories lose distinction and meaning over time – becoming recollections not aided by photographs, but rather fabricated by them.

With this in mind, Memento Mori explores memory as an extension of photographic mechanics.  Borrowing its name from the practice of postmortem photography prevalent in the 19th century, this series comprises a sequence of projected slides of anonymous people and places positioned in environments incongruous from the ones they originally occupied.  The result is an investigation of our long entrenched tradition of memorializing that which falls before the camera – an impulse rooted as much in the negation of death as it is in the simple urge to see our lives pictured.  Whether depicting people still living, or in the case of memento mori photographs, those who have already died, the photograph has historically acted as an agent protecting us against the deterioration of our own cognizance.  When considered in this manner, the photograph is imbued with a eulogizing power. 

The source images from this project were culled from the bins of various thrift stores where, neglected and dormant, they’ve rested amongst thousands very similar.  Seemingly pedestrian in many ways, these photographs that once possessed personal significance have since faded into a cultural graveyard – relegated to an existence where meaning is enigmatic and illusory.  In their resulting resurrection, the subjects (whether animate or inanimate) become specters of a history that they have been disassociated from.  Stripped of their original context, the projected images in Memento Mori act as mnemonic symbols that reinforce, rather than impede, our own transience.