MEMORY SERIES

“ A photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.”

Or a memory, as Kodak used to say – “share your memories through us”

In the digital age the emphasis is on perfection, how to take the perfect landscape, portrait, nature, action shot………….the perfect picture, the perfect memory.

But memory is not perfect.  It is confused, blurred, distorted, shifted out of focus, distilled through our internal image bank so that what we see in our mind’s eye can often be unreal and imperfect.

It has emotion and feeling; vague, shrouded and subjective; saturated and evocative.

A new discipline has emerged over the past 10 years – lomography & toy photography.  Technically it has taken back the discipline of film photography using very basic, often completely plastic cameras with the emphasis on subjective, accidental, blurred and over-saturated colours.  The focus is on capturing everyday life but by breaking the standard rules espoused by the “picture perfect” magazines.

The result is the “interpretation of the real”.

In this series of photographs I have attempted to infuse them with the lomographer’s approach, to capture an essence or an emotion that I felt was in the original photographs.

I have attempted to replicate this approach, using a digital process, by distorting the images, blurring them, shifting the chromatic spectrum, vignetting them, over-exposing them to create the mnemonic which then triggers the emotional response, an emotive as well as visual stimulus through the images.