Your imagery. Not mine.

On the series Recollection

By embracing the fiction of reality, qualities of profound emotion and effortless expression take form. You can see memories everywhere you look. The noise of the past. It is inexplicable and in the realms of the irrational. Can anything be real, or is everything a sham? And why is this pretence not considered true? The actual fades into the unreal, but at the same time keeps a shade of actuality.

To the best of your recollection, nothing like this ever happened to you. At the same time you strive to rememeber. The images are there, but nevertheless it seems that this has never happened. It might be an invention of your mind. The modern human brain works this way, remembering. Photographs are memories, but memories are not photographs. These stories are not photographs, so how can I tell you stories using imagery that does not belong to any of us? I am willing to provide the images, but nothing more. I want to present a reality that never happened to me, but to you.

Photography is fictional. Fiction based on facts. It happened, but cannot be true. The stories are in the photographs, but more so in you. Even though the photograph is constant, it creates different stories. It tells complete stories, but not without relying on the viewer to tell them to himself, not without interruptions. Emotion precedes the present, and the constant is something from the past. I think, but am not sure it has never happened to me. Although it seems it has.

November 2002.