Rememory

You Rememory me?

Yes. I remember you.

You never forgot me?

Your face is mine.

― from Beloved by Toni Morrison

In this series, I have chosen to deliberately subvert traditional expectations of portraiture by asking my subjects to close their eyes. Each person is asked to recall a past event of personal significance, thereby physically inverting and psychologically internalizing their gaze. To encourage each person to negotiate an imaginary mind space free of the camera's appraising gaze, the photographs are made in complete darkness.

The work's title invokes historian Pierre Nora's description of memory as malleable, and in a continuous process of metamorphosis and adaptation. Nora refers to memory not as an act of remembrance, but rather as a feature of the past shaped by the present. Engaging in the act of rememory, my subjects were asked to consciously recall moments from their pasts, while unfailingly, they remain aware of the present, wound within the conspicuous circumstances of the photography session

Tantamount to the subject's experience is the historic evolution of the photographic medium itself and our contemporary conception of it. Although each portrait was taken using a traditional model view camera and film, the negatives were scanned for digital output via the most current and technologically advanced hardware. Within this interplay of past and present, the subtle toning and shallow depth of field of the soft black and white images evoke the melancholy of Victorian era post-mortem photography, whereas scale and presentation posit the images firmly in the present, instigating a dialogue between the two--a rememory of sorts

Susan Dobson